February 14, 2005

Why does Mac OS X include IE?

Posted at February 14, 2005 08:09 PM in BitWise , Technology , Web Sites .

Today was a day of battling browsers. Victory was sweet with all but IE 5.2 for Mac OS X, which I hope has been banished from OS X 10.4. The latest version was released in 2001, and it shows.

A couple of places on the new site make clever use of iFrames (which probably could be "better" done in CSS, but that's a discussion for elsewhere). In particular, two places resize the iFrame based on the content, which was relatively easy to get working, though some tweaking was necessary on Mozilla-based browsers.

Unfortunately, IE 5.2 for Mac OS X seems to be rather broken in its handling of iFrames. Not only will they not dynamically resize (though exactly why is still a mystery), they don't even show at all if the iFrame has no border. As soon as you turn the border back on, the iFrame shows up. Go figure.

So, if you browse the new BitWise site on OS X using IE 5.2 (which represents a very, very small minority of worldwide web surfers, I'm quite confident) you'll get fixed-size iFrames with a border. You'll just have to deal with it, I'm afraid. Even better, update to a real browser. IE on the Mac needs to just explode and disappear.

Ironically, the site works just fine on Netscape 7, the long-term king of the "junk" browsers.