window.innerWidth = screen.width;
window.innerHeight = screen.height;

This in particular. Because, you know, some people beleive their choice is better than yours, so they force your browser window to full width and height everytime you enter their site by entering this code right in the body under a script tag.

Now, you may be like the multiple Windows users, addicts to everything maximized, which was a very reasonable thing to do on smaller screens. It may be the only thing I’ve always critized the Mac for, the lack of true window maximization. But, it does fit well on a super-sized screen Mac. A bit less “fit” on Windows though, I still think my browser window belongs in the “equivalent to 19″ monitor” width rather than a full 1920px. The reason is simple: the background color of a browser window is often white, and, as our monitors today are simply freakishly bright, having all that white in the background is like putting a flash-light on your eyes while you read. I personally prefer seeing just the right size browser window, full height of course (considering you have a widescreen monitor in paysage format), with the nuanced background of the computer. It’s much more pleasing to the eyes, and frankly, most appealing than the bland backgrounds web pages are often given.

Maybe someone should start a standards organization about that; ban the stupid codes, kind of like what happened to blink, and what should happen to animated gifs.

Edit: On another XP system, the behavior is totally different and IE 6 does identifiy as IE 6. Additionally, forcing IE 8  to display in “compatibility mode” makes it identify as IE 7. Problem solve, on some computers only I guess. Btw, no problem in Vista either.

Huh? What does this mean?

Well, today I was testing out stuff on IE, most notably, the famous <!–[if IE]> code. No, I’m not an anti-IE guy, although I’d wish Microsoft was faster at implementing standards, but they’re getting better. This means I was looking into using <!–[if lt IE 8]>, which means, if lower than IE 8.

My whole purpose is to put up an advert on my site, only if you have something lower than IE 8 (another IE), that tells the person to upgrade its browser, or they might not benifit from a full experience on my site. This is a nice and soft way to ease the people into newer, more compliant browsers. At least, less radical than blocking access to your site entirely or telling people to upgrade to Firefox unequivocally as if it was a god…

That appart, I tested out the thing with IE 8 and IE 6, with the help of the Multiple IE thingie. Well, it didn’t work. It never worked. The only time the thing would appear was if I put <!–[if IE8]>, which, while obviously right in IE 8, shouldn’t work in IE 6. What’s more, it worked for every other browser; Opera, Firefox nor Safari or Chrome were taking themselves for IE and were totally ignoring the code.

Great, but how do I make it work? Actually, the reality is it does work! Yes, because my IE 6 really does identify as IE 8, and every other IE on my system too. Yes, on Windows, IE identifies system-wide, so even if you managed to get multiple versions of IE on your system, they’ll all identify as the one you “regularily installed”, in my case, IE 8.

While this means I’ll have to use multiple computers to test it, it’s not like I really have to worry about it. I wouldn’t test IE 5, even if I wanted it to see it. Point made, if you must really make sure everything displays as you want, just shove in <!–[if IE8]> temporarily and you’re good for testing the visual style of your thing.

Man, why is that browser so entrenched in the system… I wonder if Safari does the same on OS X.
(BTW, this is on XP, the behavior may be completely different on Vista or 7, well, I hope so cause that’s what I’m testing on at home, work is XP)