God, I hate Internet Explorer!

As you can read webdesign is one of my hobbies, but not something I learned in school. All the things I know are things I have learned myself "the hard way" and need to solve it the "do it yourself way". One of the things that keep surprising me every time is the different way browsers behave. That being one thing, but why do browsers from one certain company called Microsoft all behave different?

I was making a website with Virtuemart and was altering the standard template delivered with Virtuemart to match my style. So far so good. Now the website is what I like it to be and started testing it with the really great software provided by Adobe called Browserlab. With this software I am able to test my website in all the browsers I can imagine. There are more websites delivering this kind of service and do their job, but this does it fast and in a nice and clean environment.

But what I was afraid of happened. Internet Explorer 8 was messing up a perfectly good website that every other browser in the world is showing without any problem. Maybe the guys at Microsoft think they have delivered a great piece of software, but a browser should do 1 thing and 1 thing only. Show a website the way people want it to show and do it the same way every other browser does! Just try to make the difference in speed, user friendly interface, safety and things like that. The strange thing is Internet Explorer 8 is slow and I think has a crappy interface. Below the screenshots of the header of my template.

Internet Explorer 7

InternetExplorer7

Internet Explorer 8

InternetExplorer8

Fortunately for Joomla users there is a non-commercial plugin that fixes this problem by telling Internet Explorer 8 to behave like Internet Explorer 7. I doesn't only sound stupid, it is stupid but it works and that's what really counts. The name of this plugin? Internet Explorer 8 compatibility.

Today (17th of january 2010) NU.nl, a big newssite from The Netherlands, backed up my article with a big article that the German authorities advised everyone not to use Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 in XP, Vista and 7 until a serious leak is patched that enable users to monitor your system. They think this leak recently is used to attack Google and other companies in China.

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