Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

User Experience

IE6 CSS bug

22 Apr 2003

I’ve heard people complain that Microsoft has stopped innovating with their browser. What’s worse is that they’ve become so complacent in their market share that they don’t even fix browser bugs unless they are security related.

Internet Explorer has several well-documented browser bugs, the most commonly seen being the CSS scrolling bug. On some pages that use CSS layout, the browser won’t display scroll bars unless you reload the page.

The latest CSS bug to bite me is that IE6 refuses to render the background colors or images of block elements unless they are relatively positioned. The header of a new site that I was working on wasn’t being displayed in IE6 unless the browser was in full-screen mode. Adding .header { position: relative; } to the CSS fixed it.

This is inexcusable. Microsoft knows about these bugs and should be releasing patches to fix them. I’d love to use CSS layout for more of my client sites, but every time I try to do something innovative with the layout I find myself bogged down in workarounds and ugly hacks. The Web’s been around for nearly a decade. Isn’t it time that the tools grew up?

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