If Microsoft Insist On Making It Nigh-on Impossible For Us To Test IE Effectively Then Why Do They Think We Should Bother Supporting It?

But I decided that was a bit too long, so I took inspiration from the soup kitchen chef instead, it’s more to the point.

Anyway the reason I’m back writing about adventures in IE testing land is I have a week of some horrid IE browser testing of my current, JavaScript heavy, project coming up if the first quick check through all versions of IE is anything to go by. Yes I know I should have been testing as I went along, but having to refresh 9 browsers with every change really kills my buzz (especially when 3 of those are IE).

So I did some initial browser testing last week and got zero issues in 6 browsers, but each version of IE threw up massive amounts of JavaScript errors — absolutely all over the place — and we all know how annoying debugging JS is in IE. This combined with my aging (and decidedly creaky) Windows XP Virtual Machine (running in Parallels on a Mac Pro with more than enough grunt to run multiple VM’s all at once) meant that tonight I decided to look for new alternatives (as multiple versions of IE on a single VM have never been great anyway).

So single VM images (as light and quick as possible) was my plan and I started to do some research, and found the following:

• Microsoft handily supply a bevvy of Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image’s exactly for this situation. Score 1 Microsoft!
• These are Virtual PC images, which is only available for Windows… but I found these instructions for converting them to run with either VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox. Score 1 Mac and the sweet, sweet people on the Internet

So I’m all set right? The steps aren’t that difficult and I choose to try VirtualBox as

1. I’ve tried VMWare Fusion before and wasn’t that keen.
2. I know that VMWare won’t run at the same time as parallels. A big minus there.
3. I’ve wanted to try VirtualBox for a while.

I do a few downloads, the conversion stuff and within the hour I have VirtualBox booting the image. It boots quickly and it’s nippy, I assume they’ve stripped Windows down to the bare bones with just enough to run IE properly – which is what I was going to try and do anyway. Windows says something about having to re-activate so I try, that fails but says I have 3 days so I figure that has to be due to the last step I haven’t completed, which I then do and reboot. Only to get the following:

1. WGA prompt
2. Follow instructions
3. Fail
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 a couple more times
5. Search Google and find out that they’ve gone and restricted it to running in Virtual PC only. Microsoft FAIL. It’s in the EULA so I should have noticed it… Like I’m going to read every EULA put in front of my face.

Peter L who is the “Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division” has the following month and a half old update:

I’ve spent some time investigating this issue, and now understand that the VPC images used to work on other hosting environments, but with the latest release, don’t any more. We have a better understanding of the issue now, and while we’re looking for a solution, we don’t have one right now. If you’re using the VPC’s, and they don’t work any more, I encourage you to email me, with your name, how you’re using them and the hosting environment that you’re using.

I’ll drop him an email but I don’t expect to get a resolution any time soon.

So a couple of hours of work and I’m back to square one, the only positive thing I can take from this is VirtualBox seems quite fast and neither it nor Parallels have complained about the other. So I might try converting my Dev VM’s and setting up a new Multi-IE Windows VM on there.

But the big thing I take from this is that Microsoft don’t want you to play with them if you don’t own a Microsoft football. I quite honestly would be quite happy to do that, to never have to open IE again would suit me fine.

Unfortunately that would also mean commercial suicide for a web developer who works on public facing sites.

This was based on my personal experience and my personal preference – I think your average user appreciates being able to easily identify a text box, a form button etc. – as forms can be confronting beasts to some people. If you leave all the form controls in their default style in the users chosen browser then at least they can readily and quickly identify and understand them.

This is always something that the designer in me (and designers and other colleagues I work with) naturally (and usually subconsciously, on my part) fight. Quite often I end up styling form controls (buttons especially) in my design mock-ups and by that point it’s harder to let go of them.

I have in the past on numerous occasions thought "I wish that all browsers would allow me to do whatever I want with form controls" but that thought soon passed when I thought about some of the hideous monstrosities that would allow people to create, I’d never even contemplated the why and how it would be implemented by the browser or in CSS. Eric Meyer, on the other hand, has thought about it. It’s a very long post but defiantly a worthwhile read if this is something you’ve ever had to face.

For those of you who haven’t, all I have to say is this: you lucky bastards.

I did quite a lot of searching for some ready made solutions and found none that had the complete feature set that I required or any complete versions based on Prototype, the closest I found was Encytemedia’s Prototype/Script.aculo.us Javascript Image Cropper, but this is far from complete.

So after a week and a half of work, I present the JavaScript image cropper UI, built on Prototype & script.aculo.us, there is also demo page which allows you to try out all the functionality of the image cropper UI.

I have spent the majority of my spare time over the past week and a half working on this and I am quite confident in the version 1.0 status I have given it. It contains all the functionality I originally envisaged, plus some, and works in all the major modern browsers on PC (including IE 5.5) & Mac.

As this little project has taken up so much of my time I also decided to add donation links to the bottom of each of the code pages for those who wish to show their appreciation for the time it has saved them from having to implement their own version of the utility.

As usual all comments/feedback/bug reports should be placed on the code page for the image cropper.

I liked the look of the interface, just as I like the interface of Pages and I can see the market that Apple are aiming for with these products – the home computer user who wishes to make their creative output appear more professional.

My other first thought was "I bet the code output is awful", apparently I was in the minority there.

OK, I admit I wasn’t expecting it to be quite as bad and it could be made slightly cleaner and at least should be attempting to use the correct markup for things like paragraphs.

But when you get to separating style from content I don’t think you’re going to get any better results at the moment. As a web developer I know the many decisions I make as to how the page is coded and whether a element should have a class name or an id when coding my XHTML. That’s before I’ve even started thinking about how the CSS rules are going to be applied as once you get cascading involved the number of educated decisions I make rocket.

If you are expecting someone to come along offering the kind of results a good web professional will produce, both visually and at the code level, via a WYSIWYG I think you’ll always be disappointed.

Do you really under-value your hard earned skills that much anyway?