They integrated Internet Explorer into the operating system and it cost them the freedom to do business.
The objective of integrating IE into Windows was seen by legislators as an attempt to kill off Netscape. Indeed, it looked at the time like it was pretty succesful. Netscape died. Along with their vision of a Netscape Communicator based operating system.
But Microsoft were oh so stupid. Now they have a tightly integrated browser... but to what end? It's impossible to work with.
The last few days I've been trying to make prooveme.com's pages work in IE. This is aside from the ridiculous situation with generating keys.
Unfortunately... Microsoft's DOM is a little eccentric to say the least. And the lack of integrated development tools is just this side of ridiculous. Maybe Microsoft don't care about me: a unix hacker trying to make my code work on their browser: "let him buy Windows" I can hear them saying.
Yeah. Great. I'll buy Windows. Oh! But that's not enough... I'll also have to buy the development tools that support Javascript as well. Just to debug script in a webpage.
Frustration drove me to find a simpler way. Fortunately, Javascript is so dynamic it's not hard to do. I've started including the following code in my pages while I debug them in IE:
<div>
<textarea cols="50" rows="5" id="src">
</textarea><br/>
<button type="button"
onclick="document.getElementById('output').value = new String(eval(document.getElementById('src').value));">eval</button><br/>
<textarea cols="50" rows="2" id="output">
</textarea>
</div>
This puts 2 great big textareas on the page you're working on and let's you eval Javascript within the context of the page.
As an alternative to firebug... it sucks. But as an alternative to nothing it's just what the doctor ordered.
Nic Ferrier