Internet Explorer sucks.

I’ve been tweaking my site over the past couple days, and it has renewed my absolute hatred for Internet Explorer, and through it, Microsoft. Why? Because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow the w3c‘s guidelines and standards.

I primarily write my code by hand. I’ll use Dreamweaver to simplify tasks involving content, but when it comes to layout I always work with the code, be it for HTML, CSS, or php. (Different web design languages.) Thus, I know that I am following web standards, because I’m writing the code myself (and, I admit, I have multiple reference books I check to make sure I’m writing things correctly.)

What ticks me off is when I write correct code, and IE ignores it.

Here is the front page for my website. I created pure CSS menus that appear when you place your mouse over an option. (Starting with the Cats option there are no menu options to appear, so it’s not broken.) This hover menu works in Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, Safari, and IE7. But not IE6. (I think they worked in Opera, but I no longer have Opera installed on any of my computers.) When I saw that this was fixed for IE7, I was delighted, thinking that Microsoft was finally going to follow web standards, especially when I discovered that IE7 also supports fixed positioning (see here for an example).

But no, I was wrong, IE7 still doesn’t follow all web standards. So the menus in all my book pages work in Safari, Netscape, Firefox, Seamonkey (and I think Opera) but not IE6 or IE7. Considering the amount of work I put into creating and maintaining those menus, this really irks me.

And, I discovered yesterday, that IE still screws up layout; I’m assuming it’s still rendering margins incorrectly. So I had to tweak a perfectly constructed layout, to fix the fact that IE was overlapping layers.

So it’s not the products per se that bug me, but Microsoft’s arrogance in refusing to follow the web standards used by every other web browser. So whoever is behind that monumentally bad idea has best stay out of my way, or I’ll kick them soundly in the shins.