• 24 November 2010Internet Explorer no longer supported (for the time being).

    Thanks to member c_etter, I am aware that the website is basically unusable in Internet Exploder.

    It probably chokes on some simple Javascript compatibility errors that I could fix in less than an hour (I have plenty of experience with this), if it wasnt for the fact that Micro$oft decided to make it really hard for Mac and Linux users to run the Virtual PC images outside of Virtual PC.

    As you can see on that page the VPC images are "for testing websites with different Internet Explorer versions on Windows XP and Windows Vista". These are time limited pre-activated versions of Windows XP and Vista; They automatically expire every four months, at which point you need to download another update.

    On Mac, I need to use Virtual Box (free), or Parallels or VmWare (not free). This used to work about a year ago but Micro$oft has purposefully changed their stance and forced the "Genuine" Activation onto users who do not run the Virtual PC images under Windows. Needless to say I am really disappointed with this.

    Let me be clear: this isn't a Mac vs PC thing. At my last day job, for four consecutive years; I honed my skills at building IE 6 compatible websites, both CSS and Javascript. I worked with Windows XP, on a PC. Even on a Windows machine I had to use these virtual PC images, because you can only have one version of IE installed. So in my first couple years I had IE6 by default, and Virtual PC to test the IE7 or IE8 beta. The least year I had upgraded to IE8, and used Virtual PC to test IE6 and IE7.

    Well flash forward to today, I can't run a Virtual PC image with an emulator on Mac, so I am forced to either buy another genuine copy of Windows (two actually since IE9 will not run on XPSP3); or I have to "patch" Windows to somehow skip the activation. Needless to say I'm not buying this overpriced piece of software. I already have a genuine copy of XP that I moved to a Macbook Pro, and a genuine copy of Windows 7 which I use with bootcamp in my iMac (for gaming, pretty much).



    Long story short: I apologize for the broken Internet Explorer support, but it will not be fixed anytime soon. Given the percentage of total visits to this site from Internet Explorer, I am going to put my development to better uses for the time being.

    Comments and help is welcome in the related forum topic.

    Solutions: please consider using better, faster, safer browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Opera for running the website. Keep in mind all these browsers can be installed alongside each other, there is nothing preventing you from using more than one browser. Each have their strengths, and weaknesses. It is actually a favorite trick of mine to set a different home page in each one, and use them for different purposes (for example I'm not an Opera fan, but I liked that it has BitTorrent download built in, your mileage may vary).

    If you are stuck with an old version of IE at work, please consider using portable Firefox, Google Chrome portable, etc. These are stand alone browsers that do not require installation and can even be run off the USB stick (your bookmarks and private data is also "portable").

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