Microsoft, what the hell are you playing at?

This week, I had not one, but two phone calls from customers announcing to me that their site had stopped working.  In both cases, it was the menu at fault.  One site has a fairly hefty javascript based menu, and the other drop-down submenus.  So, off I go, testing the sites in all browsers available to me, FF, IE6, 7, Safari, Mac FF, Mac Safari, and then came IE8.

Now we’re not talking a slight rendering issue here, or an IE-hackable few pixels out of place, IE8 had invented a Javascript error.  Every other browser in the world was fine, but IE8 had a problem with it.  So this is bad enough, but in IE8 there is a button called Compatibility mode.

From the MS site: Internet Explorer 8 is a new release and some websites may not yet be ready for the new browser. Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the website as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes.

Sure enough, this actually fixes the problem.  What the hell?  Microsoft have released a browser that in default form, doesn’t work very well, but if you want it  to work properly, you can just click a button.  I’m sat here now fuming about this.  If I put out a website where nothing worked, unless you click a small button first, without any prompting, I’d be fired for shoddy workmanship.  Yet the biggest software house in the world seems to think it’s ok?

Now I need to spend considerable amounts of time fixing websites to work in a minority browser, when this goes against all the normal rules just because of who it is.  Well F*** you Microsoft, I’m never going back to a PC if you keep this attitude up.  Leave your browser to die, and let the experts who work for free sort out the world’s internet browsing.