Browsers Bugs (or how to ruin an OK site design.)

Published on 30 January 2003 in , ,

If you’re viewing this page on Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 on an Apple Mac, please accept my apologies.

Not because I’m going to say anything disparaging about Macs (OS-X is nice), and IE5 on a Mac is a rather capable browser.

Most of the time.

Unfortunatly it has some really nasty bugs in it. The one which I noticed today affects this site (well unless by the time you’re reading this, I’ve fixed it.)

Unfortunatly IE5 on a Mac seems to have some pretty serious problems with some of the (rather basic) methods that I used to make the layout of this page. For some unknown reason, it crushes the left hand navigation bar. Which isn’t very nice.

Is there a way?

To be honest, I’m not sure how to resolve this. The problem appears to be a rather horrible bug in the way Mac IE5 deals with some of the code I use – code which is to be honest, pretty basic and simple (and also standards compliant). So far I haven’t found a cure for it.

The one solution I do know that will work is to turn the whole site design off for Mac IE5 users – one small tweak to the code and Mac IE5 users would never have to see it again! If you hate my design, you may be thankful of this, but it seems a rather drastic step to take. But then, at least you’d be able to read the text…

For most browsers that can’t display the site design properly (ie it looks all wrong), I turn the design off and just show a bare-bones version. The fact is that those browsers are mostly older, and predate the technologies I use. Sadly it appears that a modern browser that in theory should be able to do things right, can’t either…