Microsoft costs RedPost $500, RedPost sends invoice
Isaiah and I spent a good 5 hours between the two of us troubleshooting an error where the RedPost/Blog did not load in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7. That’s right…70% of computer users could not view our blog. This is more or less our fault for not thoroughly testing the blog in IE 6/7. We assumed that if our new stylesheet for our website worked (which we did test in IE 6/7), than it would work for the blog (which we didn’t test).
Enter Microsoft’s “design genius”.
Anyone trying to view the blog in IE 6/7 would get an “Operation aborted” error and couldn’t even see the page. Fortunately, this is a known problem:
This problem occurs because a child container HTML element contains script code that tries to modify the parent container element of the child container. The script code tries to modify the parent container element by using either the innerHTML method or the appendChild method.
Sounds technical right? Let me translate it into normal-speak: what every other browser allows you to do, SOMETHING THAT’S A FUNDAMENTAL, BASIC METHOD OF BUILDING WEB PAGES…Microsoft messed up (sorry about the all caps there). AND HAS MESSED UP SINCE 2001 (oops, sorry again). In October 2007, Microsoft finally publicly acknowledged the bug and recommended:
The easiest way for you to fix the problem is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. This problem no longer occurs in Internet Explorer 8.
Instead of fixing the bug in IE 6 or 7, they recommend upgrading to beta software. That’s even more buggy, as it’s in beta. That’s one big Vista Wow for Microsoft.
At our $100/hr billing rate, Microsoft cost RedPost $500. I’m billing them for our time. We’ll see how they respond. Hopefully we don’t have to take them to court.
I feel better now.
