As many of you know, I'm the primary developer of the UI controls of the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit -- That is to say, I've written most of the code that makes them tick, and I do almost all of the styling. Credit where credit is due of course, my coworkers have also contributed to the UI controls (and two thumbs up when they do).

 

Anyway, as part of the UI controls, we often encouter various CSS bugs and other oditities in the various browsers that we support. Right now we support IE6, IE7, IE8, FF1.5, FF2, FF3, FF3.5, Chrome 1 and Chrome 2. Yes, we don't support Opera, although I hope that we someday do. Some browsers have more quirks than others (IE6, IE7, I'm looking at you!), while the newer browsers have less bugs.. Unfortunately, when they do, they are often harder to solve and more complex in nature.

 

Dealing with these bugs is not always fun. Sometimes we encounter issues so strange, that it takes a long time digging around to find the real issue, and for most of the non-obvious ones there is suprisingly little information on the webs on how to solve them. All the IE6 and IE7 bugs are old, and well-documentated, but quirks in FF3 and so on are often less well-understood. At first I start out optimistically; "I'm sure we can find a work-around or other fix that will work in a few minutes". After that the slow realization that this might be a nasty one sets in; "Shoot, there is no information about this anywhere, did we do something completely wrong?". For the really nasty ones, it soon turns into a "Damn, this bug is really annoying, there is no info about it, and nothing I do seems to help". Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.

 

But the best part is when I finally fix a really nasty bug. It's a liberating feeling, a feeling of sticking it to "the man" -- the digital middle finger that says "we don't need a new release of your browser, our stuff works around your bugs, sucker!". This is, of course, heavily censored as I do not want to fill my blog with profanities :-).

 

... and I keep coming back for more.