1 min read

IE compatibility (again!)

I have just installed the Tiger administration plugin for WordPress. It’s quite nice. But the one thing that annoys me about it is that it doesn’t support Internet Explorer. If you have IE, it will revert to the old ugly admin style. Lack of IE support is very common in the open source arena. The usual excuse is that IE should be standards compliant and if it was then developers wouldn’t need to spend extra time making sure their sites work with it. But in reality I believe it’s an idelogical thing. WordPress itself tells me I am an idiot for using IE, with a link to a web site trying to present the virtues of Opera, Safari and Firefox. It’s actually very annoying.But Internet Explorer is a standard. Just like Windows and Office are standards. IE is not sanctioned by any official body, but it’s still the most used browser. As long as it has a significant market share, it seems stupid not to spend the time making sure your web sites work with it.Now, in the Tiger admin plugin’s case, the whole theme is based on CSS2, which IE doesn’t appear to support. There wasn’t a conscious decision to disable IE support, it just so happens that the stylesheet won’t be recognised by IE. Clever way to do it, but I’d like to be able to use this theme in my normal browser. So I might play around with it to get it to work, or I might just find one that does work.