Its so exciting when you accidently discover the follies of the biggest player in the market. Microsot’s IE is the most widely used browser esp. because it comes pre-bundled with the OS and seldom a non-techie user would use an alternative such as Firefox or Opera.
MS has been trying to make its browser more efficient and popular for a while now, and it continues to lose in front of FF or Opera. However, seldom has it acknowledged the fact. However, recently, I was working on something and it required me to download some of the content from maps.live.com .
As usual, out of curiosity, I went around tinkering with the scripts and the content and voila here’s what I found. Hidden between all the super duper code that makes this website jazzy, are some of the comments written by MS programmers themselves. Check it out:
html
{
overflow: auto; /* for IE, so it doesn’t show disabled scrollbars. FF (of course) doesn’t have this problem */
}
#pageContext
{
position: relative;
width: 75%; /* some width is necessary in order for IE6 to honor the overflow and text-overflow declarations */
padding: 8px;
z-index: 100;
color: #444;
white-space: nowrap;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
font-size: 1.1em;
min-height: 1.3em;
float: left;
}
#msve_ScratchPad .collectionList
{
position: relative;
min-height: 200px;
max-height: 280px;
height: auto;
width: 258px; /* This really shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately, becuase of IE’s lack of standards support, it is. */
overflow-y: auto;
overflow-x: hidden;
}
These are just some of the comments I found. MS knows that its browser is sub-standard, but has too much pride to acknowledge it publically.
I am a die-hard user of FF anyway. Hope you migrate there soon.
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