We have all used the great Firefox extensions that make our lives easier, there are thousands of lists out there of the top 10-15 Firefox extensions for web developers. There is of course a lot of resistance from web developers against using Internet Explorer because of its lack of standards support. A lot of this is carried over from IE 6 being so fundamentally broken at rendering web pages with CSS. There are always time though when we need to test web sites in IE6 or IE7 and just like we use our extensions for development in Firefox— it is a huge help to have add-ons installed for Internet Explorer that will allow us to do our job more effectively.

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Popularity: 28%

As some of you may be familiar with the acid2 test and some may not, I’ll give a little information to help you understand what it is. The acid2 test is a CSS test, a web standards test really. The test creates a simple smiley face image using CSS, browsers that are compliant (safari, opera) show the smiley face just as it is intended. Browsers that are not show something entirely different. IE6 shows something that doesn’t even make sense and IE7 equally shows something that makes a little more sense but not much. Firefox is almost there*, definitely much closer then IE7 though.

However, IE8 which is set to release sometime in early 2008 has passed the acid2 test and will be released passing it as well. This is all according to the IE Blog over at Microsoft, some pretty exciting news about Internet Explorer users (and haters). Hopefully the IE hacks of the past will be no more with the release of IE8. We can only hope that there will be some kind of update to IE7 that will make it compliant also.

*Update: Firefox 3 Beta does pass the acid2 test, thanks Asa.

Popularity: 76%

I get this question quite a bit for people that need to test their web sites on IE6 mostly that already have IE7 installed. I have found a great piece of software from TredoSoft that does just this. It basically installed IE 3.0, IE 4.01, IE 5.01, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on your computer to let you test your web page on them. This is all assuming you have IE7 already installed. If for whatever reason you don’t want to replace your IE6 with IE7 they also have a stand alone IE7 that you can install to test your web pages on.

I mostly use this software for testing web pages on IE6 standalone. This is a very useful software for testing your web page. For those of you wishing to test Safari you may know that it has been released for PC, but it is still a little buggy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good way right now to test other browsers on your Mac but I will keep an eye out for something that does. Hopefully the company will create IE6 stand alone for the Mac soon. Currently it does work for Windows XP and Vista though.

Popularity: 11%

This week it is a hack that I am providing for everyone to enjoy, it allows you to easily add a quick style within your existing style sheet to target internet explorer. This can help so you don’t have to check your ie CSS file if is just a simple margin adjustment. Which as we all know internet explorer has some issues with, especially internet explorer 6. The underscore hack is pretty basic but I will go over the various uses for it and touch on what browsers it affects and which browsers ignore it. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

This is part of a new segment I will be starting, there will be others but I figure this is a pretty good one to have. There are a lot of weird things about IE6 (and lower) and even IE7 browsers that make most web developers want to tear their eyes out and ignite them where they fall. For this reason there are a lot of CSS hacks that make Internet Explorer behave. This week I am going to discuss the most useful hack of them all, which really isn’t a hack it is more of a feature. (more…)

Popularity: 12%