If you’re one of the stupid people who still willingly uses Internet Explorer, or if your boss won’t let you install a more intelligent browser, you’ve noticed a change on this site lately. I made a change to the menu so that it is positioned as a fixed element. This bit of CSS was implemented years ago, but Microsoft’s browser never recognized it, until their latest release, version 7. I like using fixed positioning for the menu because then it stays put as you scroll down the screen. There is also a workaround that I could implement that would fix the layout problem that Internet Explorer has. In fact I’ve already done that for the Vintage Fashion section. But since this is a personal site, I decided to make a statement with this one.

See, me and every other web designer is tired of spending hours debugging sites that have code that validates to the published web standards, only to find out that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. There are also lots of good features that would be available if they worked correctly in IE. Unfortunately, IE still owns the highest percentage of browser market share, with about 90% of the people still using it. So we’re pretty much stuck having to design around Microsoft’s buggy software. It’s so bad that I finally bought one of the new Apple MacBooks so I could run Windows easier. The photo shows the same page being displayed on my iMac in Safari and the MacBook running IE under Windows. In my opinion, loading Windows on a Mac computer ranks right up there with waterboarding. I swear I could hear the laptop screaming during the lengthy Windows installation process.

In case you’re wondering what the alternatives are, there are two excellent and free browsers that are available on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari. It is now my personal mission to get people to convert from IE, so check them out.