IE to some of you is “Internet Explorer” but to me it’s “Internet Excrement” that in actual practice behaves like “Internet Exploder.” I was emailing earlier with Justin Baeder about a few snippets of code he was gracious enough to share with me… and which result effortlessly in the new Technorati tags at the foot of each post. By the way, if anyof you Blogger users would consider switching to the best blogging engine available, Justin’s started hosting such blogs for $4/month. I’ve been running WordPress on our servers for clients since back in the days it was called b2, and it was the best thing around at that time too.

But I digress, I’m supposed to be ranting on IE. Justin let me know that on the main page only (not the permalink pages), the text in the menu bar on the right was only about 1 pixel or so high. I was able to duplicate this right away on the kids’ PC… stupid IE. It’s all because MSIE still can’t understand CSS. I had to change a from id= to class=alignright floatright for my menu bar, and change the style sheet to match… AND I had to add an extra line to define the font size because IE6 still doesn’t understand inheritance. Worked fine on other browsers and platforms. The page still displays incorrectly in IE, the font in the blog entries for some reason seems to get smaller as you move down the page, and when you mouseover the lines with hypertext in them, they jump to the right and align themselves where they should have to begin with. What a mess.

So I have this to say to all MSIE users: go and get Firefox now. I could give you a ton of ‘religious’ reasons, but I’ll stick to five practical ones. (1) it’s far more stable and more secure; (2) it properly renders CSS and adheres to published web standards; (3) the end of popups; (4) tabbed browsing; and (5) tabbed browsing. Here’s an extra reason for free, (6) live bookmarks. Live bookmarks is essentially built-in RSS parsing. Tabbed browsing (yes I know I listed it twice) is something you have to use to fully appreciate… but unless you’re one of the eight people online who keep one window, and one window only open at a time, you will never go back once you get hooked on tabbed browsing. I have a bookmarks folder with my site, my admin pages, and a few blogs and blog aggregators I check daily using old-fashioned html — all I need to do is click the “Open in Tabs” option in that folder and I suddenly have them all open in one window in tabs arrayed below the menu bars. It’s a beautiful thing.

Besides all those reasons, people like me won’t have to waste time coding around MSIE screwups… and testing with a browser and operating system not of our choosing. At the risk of offending the half of you that visit here with IE, please, make the switch! You’ll be glad you did.