Your Trusted Browser

There’s a rule in web design: let people choose their browser. Opera, Firefox, Safari—good options, all of them. Then there’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s monument to making designers question their career choices.

I tested the whole thing in every browser I could find. Perfect everywhere else. But IE had some rendering glitch that shoved the sidebars down below the content. Not just IE6—I could’ve written that off as ancient history. But the latest IE7 release candidate did it too.

I spent the whole afternoon trying to make it work. CSS hacks, conditional comments, every trick I knew. Nothing. The browser just wouldn’t cooperate. And the kicker was 90% of people online were still using IE. Ninety percent. So I couldn’t ignore it.

Two options: keep fighting something you can’t win, or accept that most of your visitors are going to see a broken site. I wasn’t going to force anyone to switch browsers—that wasn’t my call. But IE users got the fractured version.

The weird part was that some people seemed fine with it. They’d come back, navigate around the busted layout like it was intentional. Maybe they thought it was some kind of alternative design choice. Maybe it was.