Internet Explorer vs. Firefox

This morning I was awoken by a phone call before 7am. Some software I wrote during this past year is being shown to a large company and it was not working correctly. I thought that was strange because it was working just fine before I went to sleep last night. So I got to spend my morning debugging software and figuring out why it worked last night and not this morning.

The software I have been working on is a web-based application and meant to run in a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. The first thing I did was go down to my office and retest the software on my computer. It worked last night and it worked again this morning. So I called the person reporting the error to try and find out what the problem was.

The page causing the error has an animation that counts down for 6 seconds and then jumps to another page. At the end of 6 seconds, the other computer was giving a cryptic error message and stalling. So I pulled out the delay and had the page go immediately to the next one. It worked for my computer but not for the other. Trying to figure out the problem over the phone was extremely difficult because I couldn't see what was going on. Furthermore I couldn't see those really obvious problems like the user trying to use a word processor instead of a browser. It was incredibly frustrating.

After about fifteen minutes of asking questions it became clear that the other person was using Internet Explorer and not Firefox. Having managed a software development team for one of the first browsers (Netscape), I know that there are differences between browsers and what works in one will not work in another. My software was developed to only run in Firefox and not Internet Explorer. This eliminated the need to test the software in multiple environments. Since all the computers running the software were supposed to be configured with Firefox, this shouldn't have been a problem.

Unfortunately my software was about to be shown to the big company using a browser I hadn't anticipated. Furthermore it wasn't working and I had less than ten minutes to fix it. It took me five minutes to track down the single line of code causing the problem and remove it from three different places. We did a quick run-through on Internet Explorer and the software ran flawlessly but without my countdown delay. The delay was there only for cosmetic purposes and so it wasn't really necessary but kind of looked nice.

So what was the problem? Stylesheets. What are stylesheets? They are what control how the page looks. Should I, as a regular computer user, care about stylesheets? Nope, but as a software developer I do. So if you ever stumble across a web page that doesn't look quite right, it is probably a stylesheet issue.