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
<ul>
    <li>IE8: 30

<p>Interestingly (and disapointingly) half the bugs in 8 weren&#8217;t in 7 but were in 6 so they mostly progressed but had a few set backs to old bugs. Weird.</p>

<p>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&#8217;s for a creative but somewhat corporate design. For clean simple designs it&#8217;s sometimes non existent and for more twisted/artsy/original designs it can shoot up quite a bit.</p>