Developers blog » Internet Explorer

All elements have layout

astro — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:39:10 +0000

Hunting one of the strangest layout issues in IE – if you hover over an element, the input elements on the page mysteriously move down – we learned about the very strange concept of “layout” internet explorer employs: Give your elements height, width or one of the other CSS-properties that “cause an element to have layout” (I can’t help but giggle when I read this, and I have no clue what it’s supposed to mean) and many of your IE display issues will disappear.

However, just saying

* {
min-height: 0;
}

in all of your stylesheets will introduce some new problems like empty divs having heights, so use it wisely. If you are bored and really want to know the details, read the incredibly long article on layout here.

Never thought I would ever file an article under Fun and tag it Internet Explorer at the same time.

Bye Bye IE6!

astro — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:05:11 +0000

Next month, we will stop supporting IE6 in conjectPM. This means getting rid of all those “if it’s IE6 add 2 pixels to the y-position”, deleting lots of CSS hacks, throwing away all spezialized stylesheets… we’re already counting the days (great that February is such a short month) and think about having a “hooray, no more IE6!” party.

Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)

IE: Java Runtime Environment (JRE) not recognized

Ron — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:33:34 +0000

As the Issue Manager – a liaison position between our tech support and development – you always discover interesting constellations under which Java applets that our web application uses simply won’t run. A bunch of customers with Internet Explorer 7 or 8 could not launch any of our applets, although other applets worked perfectly fine for them.
Internet research yielded no similar experiences this far, so hopefully this one will help if you are facing the same issues… the message is: keep your system clean!

These were the tests I ran:

The applet checker on Sun’s Java Website returned a correct installation of the currently up to date 1.6.0_13 JRE
Entering “javascript:navigator.javaEnabled();” in the URL box returned “true”

Still, our applets would not start, showing the non-applet alternative text instead.

Here’s how to get this to work in IE6, 7 and 8:
Go to Extras => Manage Add-ons => Activate/Deactivate
List all add-ons currently in use:

You can see that under “Currently deployed Add-ons” not all Sun Microsystems add-ons are activated. Activate all of them, this should help!

In our case the JRE 1.5 add-on was deactivated, which shouldn’t have interfered with the applet being executed using the later JRE, but it did.

What’s peculiar is the way the add-on shows three times. I suspect this happens when uninstalling and reinstalling different JRE versions.
It’s also not possible to remove the add-ons completely, you can only disable them (unless you fiddle with the registry, which I wouldn’t recommend to our clients).

You can prevent this situation by using JavaRa, a handy tool that helps you uninstall any outdated JRE scrap from your computer:
http://raproducts.org/javara.html

Microsoft boasts about its improved add-on handling in IE8 (see http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/20/add-on-management-improvements-in-internet-explorer-8.aspx), however it is still possible to end up with old JRE residues on your machine.
With this mystery solved, let’s see what Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have in stock in terms of future surprises!

Reanimation

Christoph — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:41:43 +0000

To make our user interface more shiny we recently decided to use animated gifs in a couple of places. Especially when using ajax to reload some areas of the page we want to show a spinning wheel . For the user it feels more like something is going on (something is beeing processed) instead of having some kind of frozen screen. But with Internet Explorer it is not done with just placing an animated gif in the page. IE stops animating the gif in a couple of scenarios. Here you can see some hacks to convince IE to animated the gifs again:

IE stops animating the gifs on page submit. Here is the code to reanimate the gif:

function refreshAnimatedWaitGifForIE() {
var waitImg = newWin.document.getElementById("emptyWaitImg");
waitImg.src = waitImg.src;
}

At another place just resetting the image source did not work. A frozen gif was shown. I had to change the image source to dupe Internet Explorer:

function refreshAnimatedWaitGifForIE() {
var currentMillis = new Date().getTime();
var waitImg = newWin.document.getElementById("emptyWaitImg");
var waitImgSrc = waitImg.src;
var index = waitImgSrc.lastIndexOf(‘?’);
if (index != -1) {
waitImgSrc = waitImgSrc.substring(0, index);
}
waitImg.src = waitImgSrc + "?IEanimatedGifHack=" + currentMillis;
}

Another situation – IE needs another hack to reanimate the gif:

function showInfoMessage() {
setTimeout("_showInfoMessage()", 0);
}
function _showInfoMessage() {
…
}

Here the call of a method which sets some overlay screen to visible has to be called via “setTimeout(…)” to execute the call asynchronous. I don´t know why, but it fixes the problem.

Perhaps this will be fixed by Microsoft in some of the next versions of the Internet Explorer ….?!