mahiwaga

Well, that was a little creepy. Some dude started knocking on my door around 3:55 a.m., calling out for Greg or Martin. I wonder if he was just so trashed out of his mind that he thought he was somewhere else completely. I did contemplate whether he would try to crash through my door, and figured that the only two thing I could fend him off with would be my kali sticks and my wrought iron coat hanger. I ended up not being able to go back to sleep and just camped out in the living room playing on my laptop with my kali sticks at hand. Stupid drunk people.

I looks like the version targeting debacle is still very much a heated topic.

Instead of Microsoft forcing people to stick cruft into their code, there’s an alternate solution. Allow multiple versions of IE to co-exist.

The solution seems so much simpler than creating bizarre tags and resurrecting the ugly practice of browser-sniffing that plagued us during the Netscape/Microsoft Browser War, clogging our bandwidth with crufty, convoluted Javascript and redundant HTML tags.

Admittedly, neither Firefox nor Safari make it easy to have multiple versions of themselves to exist on the same computer, but it’s not impossible.

For Firefox, all you really have to do is create multiple profiles. (The post details how to do it in Windows and Linux, but you can do the same thing Mac OS X, you just have to run the actual binary from the command line the first time you launch.)

For Safari, it’s a little bit trickier. Michel Fortin provides Multi Safari, where you can get every non-beta version of Safari that has been released. (Unfortunately, you have to muck around with the command-line to get it to work on Leopard, and I don’t even know if versions less than 2 will actually work at all.) An alternative would be to actually build Webkit. (The source code is available back to r25668 from around September 2007, although unfortunately I’m not sure what version of Safari that corresponds to.)

Both of these approaches are really moot, though, since the goal of both browsers is full standards-compliance. It would be perverse to rely on a bug from older versions of Firefox or Safari. These approaches are probably more useful for people who want to try the bleeding edge browser while keeping their stable browser intact.

Now I realize that Microsoft is not one to give into open-standards committees or the open-source community. (Just look at the OOXML imbroglio, and the still ongoing saga of SCO, a subsidiary of Microsoft that tried to claim that Linux infringed on their IP.) But instead of mutilating the Internet, they could make version targeting go away completely by allowing the peaceful co-existence of IE6, IE7, and IE8 on one machine. Hell, Microsoft wouldn’t even have to do that! They could just allow a user to keep whatever broken version of IE they want instead of auto-upgrading to IE8. Then if you needed to, you could just run a virtual machine for testing (since Mac OS X users have to do this already in order to test any version of IE.) No version targeting needed. What say ye, [Bill G][10]Steve B? (Not to be confused with that Steve. Nor the other Steve.)