John Alexander Rowley » Internet Explorer

IF statement for Internet Explorer and Chrome

John Alexander Rowley — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:12:02 +0000

Iv’e been stuck the last few days with a seemingly simple problem to do with my big green banner on the homepage of www.JohnAlexanderRowley.com. The problem is that in Internet Explorer the fade animation causes .PNG’s to loose there alpha levels (transparency) and aquire ugly black borders for a few seconds while the animation completes.

To solve this, I wanted to use a set of IF statements (iv’e covered these previously in other IE-rant articles, but couldn’t figure why it wasn’t working this time. The soltion came after a fair while of googling and head scratching.

Rather than the simple and then . I had to use an extended version for the NOT IE (!IE). Here is what I used:

code if not in Internet Explorer here.

It makes sence really, but took me ages to get my head around after I found it. Hope this helps someone as much as it helped me!

p.s. You’re NOT viewing in Internet Explorer!

Attacks on Google exploited Internet Explorer

John Alexander Rowley — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:17:13 +0000

It has emerged this week that the attacks on Chinese human rights activists were made from, yes you guessed it, Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s director of Security was quoted earlier this week saying that the attacks were “targeted and limited” and were mainly “exploiting Internet Explorer 6″. Similarly, McAfee stated that the weeks attacks “showed a level of sophistication above that of typical, isolated cyber criminal efforts”.

In Germany the government has urged Internet users to find alternatives to Internet Explorer. In the same article (taken form BBC News) Sophos (an Internet security firm) told readers that the warning should be adhered to IE6, IE7 and even IE8 as the exploits had not only been proven to work on all these browsers but also the details of how to do so posted publicly on the Internet. Google has come under even more criticism as of late, with an open letter from security firms and lawyers asking why the security settings to enable HTTPS 100% of the time when accessing Gmail, Docs and other Google applications is so hard to find.

Google is reportedly considering it’s options regarding their operations in china. It may be that the years of strict censorship over the Chinese Internet has finally built to a head, and the recent attacks have broke the camels back. Either way, Google pulling out of China would be a devastating event for Chinese companies and civilians alike.

Not according to one company; ‘Baidu’, Chinese search engine giants recently posted the following on their blog:

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.”

It’s a bit of a legal battle at the moment – let’s hope Google and China manage to come to some sort of agreement soon.

Stopping IE6 Optimization

John Alexander Rowley — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:29:37 +0000

For those of you in the know, you will understand the burden which is IE6. It’s far less efficient, and awkward to boot, at designing websites to look both good and work well. Amongst the problems are;

Images can’t be wider than 800px
Images can’t be .PNG
Padding is calculated differently

IE in general is a nuisance; things in Firefox just work! I’m currently designing a new menu for a website i’m working on, using :hover in the CSS and some onmouseover JavaScript. In Firefox everything works perfectly. However in IE (even the latest 8.0b) the onmouseover flickers. Getting around this requires extensive work – which wouldn’t be required if the browser worked like Firefox!

I realise this is a bit of a rant, but it has hit me time and time again – designing websites and previewing in Firefox, occasionally checking in IE7+ and then realising i’m going to have to re-work the site in order to make it IE6 compatible!

Merry Christmas!