Well, IE is noto­ri­ously inse­cure, but today I was hit with one par­tic­u­larly stu­pid (though sup­pos­edly not undoc­u­mented — some­one on WSG had encoun­tered it before and alle­vi­ated much pain!) ‘fea­ture’ of the browser. Basi­cally, I’ve been depen­dent upon PNG alpha chan­nel work­ing. Hey, the design isn’t mine and I’m just try­ing to make the CSS work with as few images as humanly pos­si­ble — though I have realised I have one that isn’t required, but can’t be both­ered chang­ing… because once I’ve slated my markup, I only ever add things to it as required, and never work back­wards. Oth­er­wise, I wind up in a per­pet­ual cycle of markup opti­mi­sa­tion that cul­mi­nates in a loss of prob­a­bly under 2KB over about as many days. Tis bad. Must post the way I do CSS/markup work­flow here some day, coz it’s some­thing I’d be inter­ested to see other people’s processes of and how dif­fer­ent it is/isn’t from my own.

Any­way! Digres­sion aside, I was using IE5.5+‘s filter thing (pretty well doc­u­mented PNG fix with some caveats… it’s the best we can do until IE7 in all its splen­dif­er­ous glory drib­bles from Microsoft’s front door. Don’t ask me where that came from.) with great suc­cess, but for the inces­sant secu­rity warn­ings every time I loaded the page. Yeah, great, this really looks usable. Not. Every twit using XPSP2 is going to be pretty happy to stay on a page when their browser is blurt­ing secu­rity warn­ings at them… and don’t get me started on IE7’s pro­posed phish­ing alert thing that lets users report false pos­i­tives. Dumb users (i.e. 97% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to be scared away regard­less, and mali­cious users (i.e. 2% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to write viruses that exploit the report­ing mech­a­nism to let sites through.

Wow. This is a really windy post.

Okay. On topic (hah!). The moral of the story is, don’t exe­cute web pages locally. IE won’t trust you. How­ever, if it’s on any ran­dom web server (I ended up installing Apache on loop­back), IE is per­fectly happy to let it exe­cute what­ever the hell weird kinda code it wants. And that, kid­dies, is why we all love Microsoft.

Tags: microsoft, pain, random web server, web server