I often bitch about IE (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) and with good reason but in recent years they’ve gone from 6 to 7 to 8 and with good standards support progress. For a little while now I’ve been using conditional statements to give each IE which needs it a separate CSS file with the appropriate tweaks. Often I only need one for IE6 but in the case of the project delivered last week I had to feed a separate one to each. Comparing the lines of CSS code for each gives a good idea of the progress:
- IE6: 138
- IE7: 64
- IE8: 30
Interestingly (and disapointingly) half the bugs in 8 weren’t in 7 but were in 6 so they mostly progressed but had a few set backs to old bugs. Weird.
Also note that the original which works perfectly in the most modern browsers, Firefox and Safari, weighted in at 1261 lines so the 138 lines for IE6 give a good indication of the ratio in development time; roughly 10% more for IE6. That’s for a creative but somewhat corporate design. For clean simple designs it’s sometimes non existent and for more twisted/artsy/original designs it can shoot up quite a bit.