I know I am not the first person to say this. I know I am neither the last. But I am using this post to ease my indignation about a pathetic piece of engineering called IE.

Recently I have been working on portlet development in Liferay. We developed a fancy portlet with Ajax and stuff showing content from a Alfresco deployment. While styling the portlet, I experienced nightmare. The HTML, CSS and JavaScript we developed worked in all browsers, except IE 7. And the reasons for not working are so pathetic: nested divs, nested styling components, menu generation using lists.

I am wondering what kind of coding and engineering effort would have gone into making this crap of a browser called IE. As I am imagining how to write code for parsing and rendering CSS display components, I can feel the awkward code that is inside IE parsing my CSS. Something like graceful degradation and granularity of CSS styles are simple to achieve by “a little thought” while coding. But the crap inside IE makes it so complicated!

I wish there never was a browser called IE.