We don't use any of the Microsoft browsers in normal use. We do have to perform a groan check against them though. One of those "stick your head in hands and wonder what awful things it will do with your site". Unless you are on a company computer which has been locked to certain applications I can't see why anyone would want to use a Microsoft browser when there is so much choice for the free offerings out there. The only exception are sites where they make use of Active X components to deliver extra functionality (e.g. video cams, virtual consoles and so on).
IE 8 is better than the rest, but we can spend up to 3 x longer on sites just getting the look right for the other IE browsers. IE7 seems to be the buggiest by a long way. It just does some crazy things for no reason at all. One site we had lost some images on an area of the site when you moused over another completely different image. There was no connection in code or anything. Just a bug in the silly browser. (In the bug tracking sites I think they called it something like the peekaboo image hover bug). We never tracked down what it was doing wrong and none of the reported fixes worked. We have another one now - again in IE7 - just today where it is doubling up scrollbars on a floating window - after clicking on another non-related part of the page. It's ok on relatively simple pages, but once there are a load of things going on it just doesn't play ball very well.
So having wasted hours and hours on that particular browser's foibles it isn't our best friend. We would like it to just crawl away into a hole. It's only because so many of you are using it that guys like us have to waste time getting things to work on it.
.. so you could all please us by taking Microsoft's advice and installing another browser.
All the others play ball nicely, so we don't care if it is Opera, Chrome, Safari or Firefox; anything but one from Redmond.
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