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IE 31 CSS Files Limit

Posted by james on

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out an obscure CSS bug in IE. I'd comment out a line and it'd work, I'd uncomment another and it'd break. It made no difference what the file was, only how many I commented out. Finally I figured out that there must be a numerical limit in IE7. Turns out IE6 and 7 limit the max amount of CSS files to 31. What the heck?!? This horrible bug has existed since IE6 and still hasn't been fixed in IE7, and rumors are it's still not fixed in IE8. What gives?

I hate IE more and more as I develop for it. It's amazing how incredibly complex CSS and Javascript will render and behave correctly and nearly identically in both Firefox 3 and Safari 3 which use two completely different rendering engines. The key here is that they have fewer bugs and follow standards. The Internet Explorer team simply doesn't care about either. It's amazing, and the big problem is that users don't experience the pain; only developers. And developers are usually paid by others who need to support the market, which is dominated by IE. So the ignorance of users brings about a certain market, and that causes problems for developers.

If IE disappeared tomorrow, I can't even imagine what the web would be like. It'd be a heck of a lot less expensive and painful to develop anything complex on the web, and I think we'd see an uptick in the complexity of features used in websites.