I’ve had a major gripe with Microsoft Internet Explorer for some years now, in it’s inability to handle PNG files correctly. Being able to use PNG files gives web developers some serious benefits in being able to make overlaid, semitransparent (non-binary transparency) images, compress files smaller, etc.
So, yeh – pretty much every web browser on the market has had near-perfect PNG support since 1998, and Internet Explorer has always been lagging behind (that’s why the ‘mugshots’ on abnib look ‘wrong’ in IE). But here’s the worst of it: I’ve just discovered that the MacOS version of Internet Explorer (yes; also by Microsoft) 5 – which was released almost five years ago – has excellent support for PNG graphics! That’s crazy!
It’s not that I’m affected directly – I don’t touch IE with a barge pole: my issue is that, as a web developer, I can’t take advantage of any of the shiny features of a decade-old technology, simply because the so-called ‘market leader’ hasn’t been bothered to finish writing a few hundred lines of code yet!
Okay. I’m breathing normally again now.
And my shiny new LJ background looks shit in IE, and not shiny like it does in Mozilla. That’s enough to convince me that Mozilla’s better.