Skuunk Works

So I made an interesting discovery today. console.log() in IE9 only works when the console is open! As a web developer, and especially a JavaScript developer, the most useful tool in your arsenal is console.log() . And while you should (for the most part) remove any console.log() calls from your code as soon as you have finished debugging, sometimes your library code might contain it, or other times if you are writing a framework for an intermediary to use, you might leave a couple of messages for your intermediaries using console.log() . console.log() first made an appearance in Firefox's Firebug (or at least that is when I first noticed it) and has been in most major browsers, including Internet Explorer since version 8. Whilst developing, I have happily had my console open so I can debug things. Anyways, fast forward to the current app I am working on. I am lucky enough to be working on a project that uses HTML5 canvas and the project I am working on is used by a game...

Calling all web developers. The folks over at this site have done something wonderful. http://ie6update.com/ Basically, you include this code on your site, and all IE6 users see a drop down bar which looks like an ActiveX update and links to download IE8. This is such a brilliant idea. If MicroSoft won't force people to upgrade, then we, as a community, should.

There are many similarities between using CSS hacks and lying. First of all, what is a CSS hack? A CSS hack is a means by which you can get different browsers and browser versions to see and render your stylesheets differently so you can give them different directions (ironically though it's normally done to achieve pixel perfect cross platform web pages). They are also mostly done for Internet Explorer (which for some reason refused to implement standards based CSS until recently). CSS hacks mostly exploit bugs in a particular browser such as the Star HTML hack . This hack was used to get code to run in IE6 and lower in a different manner than other browsers. IE also introduced conditional comments which allow you to add an extra stylesheet to "fix" any CSS issues. This is not technically a hack, but it does require you to write and maintain extra CSS. There are also more subtle types of hacks to make up for some things that are missing in IE like the IE min-height hack ...

http://leakedtech.blogspot.com/2008/03/internet-explorer-8-beta-1-sneak-peak.html So it looks like IE 8 Beta 1 is out. Even using VM with Parallels I am not prepared to try it out for myself. It doesn't look like there are an JS changes but mainly CSS ones. Now if they could just hurry up and kill IE6 then that would make my life much easier...