stupid

Internet Explorer 8 comes with two different rendering engines. “Standards Mode” (they use the term loosely) and “Compatibility Mode”. I’m not going to debate the reasoning behind their choice to ship the browser in this form, smarter people than I have already beaten that horse to death. The problem I have with it is that by default IE ships with a setting that makes anything on your LAN show up in compatibility mode. The button to switch to standards mode isn’t displayed, and worst of all, there is nothing that tells you it is IN compatibility mode.

I recently discovered this when, after carefully testing a site in Internet Explorers 6, 7 and 8, I committed the release to the SVN repo and published it to the staging server. A quick test showed IE8 issues that weren’t there on my local version. Turns out the problem was this default compatibility mode setting. You can turn it off by going to “Tools > Compatibility View Settings” and unchecking the “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” option. They did this to ensure old intranets are compatible with IE8 out the box, but in the process put every web designer in the awkward position of not knowing their site is broken until they upload.

Internet Explorer 8 isn’t all that bad. It does a pretty good job of fixing the (not so) little things that drove us crazy in previous incarnations, but it’s far from perfect. In the very likely event that you need to code some IE8 specific styles I recommend using conditional comments. In this case I needed one set of modifications for IE6, 7 and compatibility mode 8 (which mostly behaves like IE7) and another for IE8 specifically. To achieve this I used the following code:

<!--[if lte IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie.css" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie8.css" /><![endif]-->

It uses one stylesheet for everything less than 7 and another for IE8 specifically. Works like a charm, hopefully until IE9 comes along.

As mentioned in a previous post I dropped my iPhone a while ago and the whack caused a massive crack on the inner screen (the external glass is fine). That crack lead to the liquid crystal display (LCD) leaking liquid, causing weird grey pixel lines to come snaking up the screen. They were originally in neat little one line increments and now they’re just doing their own thing.

So I traveled to the US. I tried to get my Indian iPhone screen fixed for the princely sum of $200 at an Apple Store. End result: No dice.

The Apple Stores abroad are not allowed to replace phones that are not bought in the same country. So much for a world-wide warranty. If you break your phone while traveling you’re essentially screwed. On a side note the grey pixels appear to have stopped marching up my screen. In fact some of them seem to have gone into remission and have started working again. I don’t know how long they’ll stay this way but I hope it’ll last long enough for Apple to release their new iPhone.

I dropped my iPhone about 3 weeks ago. It has a nasty crack running from the lower right all the way up to the top left in a rather elegant arc. All the functions still work, it just looks like it got hit by a bullet or something. 

This isn’t a hacked or jailbroken grey-market phone either, just a bog-standard iPhone 3G from Vodafone. So I call them up and ask them if they can replace the screen. They tell me nobody has asked them about that yet and that they’ll get back to me. Of course, they don’t get back to me. I have to ask again and then I finally get an answer the following morning. It’ll cost me Rs. 28,000 ($600) Rs. 33,500 ($690), see the update below. The brand new phone would cost me Rs. 34,500 ($705).  To his credit, the Vodafone rep was apologetic. He said he was as shocked as I was that it cost so much. Apparently they don’t fix the screen, they just give you a new phone. I guess the Rs. 8000 off is some sort of butterfingers discount There is no discount, unless you call Rs. 1000 off and they keep the old phone a discount.

Anyway, so I go, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll live with my busted ass phone.”

That worked for about 2 weeks. But now, there’s this grey line of pixels snaking its way up my screen from the bottom. It’s actually growing one line of pixels at a time, starting from the right where the hit occurred and working its way to the left. Once the line of pixels fills up with grey it goes up to the next line. It’s on the fourth line now and it started about 8 hours ago. I wonder if the whole damned screen is going to be grey when I wake up tomorrow morning.

Update:

It’ll cost just Rs. 1000 less than a brand new phone and they take away the old phone to give me a “replacement”. I had to drive all the way to the main Vodafone store to find out this nugget of information and they didn’t even have a 16gig phone in stock essentially making my trip a complete waste. What a bunch of incompetent twits. I think I’m going to try and get it fixed in New York next month. I’ll call the Brooklyn store tonight and see if that’s possible.

IE7 has shipped and its probably (by and large) a decent browser now. But of course it wouldn’t be Microsoft if they didn’t mess up something. First in what will probably be a long line of security related “features”, Microsoft have decided to modify the way that the good old JavaScript prompt works.

The reason? Phishing sites impersonating or even superimposing themselves on real web sites were using the prompt to lure gullible users into providing credit card numbers, passwords and all sorts of powerful data. So now whenever a web page wants to use a prompt you have to click on the unnoticeable security bar at the top of the browser and “allow” temporary access. To make matters worse the prompt presented is ugly and out of place.

I’m not saying that a prompt is the best way to ask the user for data, but given the whole Web 2.0 movement there are numerous occasions where the prompt is a useful and elegant solution to on-the-fly input. The worst part is that the unscrupulous underbelly of the internet will end up using a modal window or a clever floating div about 15 seconds after they realize their old technique doesn’t work and then who loses? Why, the web 2.0 programmer that thought a JavaScript prompt was a no-brainer in terms of cross-browser support.

Phishing works because people are stupid, making your browser idiot-proof is a surefire way to drive yourself crazy.

Score one for stupidity.