When I'm developing in Windows I run a localhost copy of the web site in IIS7 (I have Vista on my Mac). I run Parallels on my MacBook Pro because I often have to work with Windows programming technologies, mostly Visual Studio and SQL Server. In fact, I'm positive the last time I used Maxi this issue didn't exist – which means they've updated the site and created a new problem. Yet the issue is so incredibly simple to fix – just change the styling on the page to a white background and dark text. Hands up everyone who knows how to change the page set up on their browser so that it would reverse or otherwise deal with this ludicrous situation? I do this for a living and I'd probably fiddle for 5 minutes. They KNOW it's a problem, but they put it onto the user to solve the problem. So of course, red rag to a bull, I clicked the print button, yup, an entire page of dark blue background plus the white text. (If you print your receipt, check the page set up on your browser to make sure it prints text as black.) Nowadays it still exists but only for these small irritating payments).Īnyhow, I dutifully pumped my Visa card number in, and back came the receipt page, which is a classic fail. It was with the City of Port Phillip, which like a bunch of councils around Melbourne uses the online payment system (I remember Maxi launching years ago amidst much hullabaloo, ideas like terminals all over the city etc etc. I picked up a parking ticket the other day and just went to pay the fine. Here's an easy, blatant example of a web site with a built in problem, that the owner acknowledges but who has decided to make it the user's problem. Note, if you are using Parallels on Mac there is some helpful information on the Parallels web site about configuring the VMs, starting with the fact the file you download has the wrong file extension – you need to manually update the file name before Parallels will recognise it as a VM. I use Parallels and here are the VM configurations available to me – it’s pretty wide, there’s even IE6 on XP, but also IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11 on Windows OS including Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.ĭownloading and setting up the VMs is a snap, within a few minutes I had a fully functional version of IE8 running on Windows 7 in a window on my Mac – and 10 minutes after that had diagnosed the problem with my web site and applied a fix. Providing you have one of the virtual machine software setups, for example Virtual PC on Windows or Parallels on Mac you are in business. However, help is at hand, with thanks to Microsoft, which has now made available pre-packaged virtual machines for many combinations of Internet Explorer and Windows OS. Of course the problem here is I don’t have IE8 on a real machine available to me anywhere. It was not handling the media queries include that’s needed to correctly render modern CSS in an IE8 browser. I then read somewhere that IE8 emulation on IE11 is not accurate – pretty useful! It seems IE11 in IE8 emulation mode does not respect conditional statements – which was what was messing with my responsive design. I tried the page in IE11, with IE8 emulation, and the pages didn’t work correctly – despite being on a full size screen, the pages were acting all ‘responsive’ on me, and rendering the mobile versions. The issue came up for me because I was messing with a little personal project the other night that uses the Bootstrap 3 framework. The major culprit almost always seems to be Internet Explorer – I’ll leave the philosophical debate why this might be the case for another day. There’s nothing more frustrating running a web site only to receive complaints that it “doesn’t work” in some specific version of a browser.
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