Developers embed Pro-Firefox/Anti-IE sentiments in their code
As a professional web application developer, I’m well aware of the challenges involved in coding for multiple browsers (and, even worse, older/buggier versions of those browsers). I also hate it when a website won’t behave the way I want it to, so I often end up viewing the source with FireBug, then messing around with the code.
If I just need to “fix” it on a one-time basis, I’ll just edit it with FireBug, but if I need it to behave better every time I visit the site, I’ll write a GreaseMonkey script (Incidentally, I use Platypus to generate a lot of my GM scripts. So easy!).
Sometimes, in the course of viewing/hacking up their code, I run across funny things that developers left in there. Here are a few of them that I’ve run across, which express the designers/developers’ browser preferences.
From viewing the source of a last.fm page:
<span class="iesucks" style="display: block"> </span>>
[I just liked their css class name]
A friend sent this next one to me a couple months ago. I went and tried it, at the time, and I got the error message. But they seem to have fixed it since then. Anyways, this online icon maker page, when viewed in IE, would throw a javascript error when you moved your mouse over the editor component on the page.The funny part was the error message:
'shitty_IE_needs_this' is undefined
Ooh, I just noticed that this site was featured on my favorite geek humor blog, Worse Than Failure (formerly known as The Daily WTF). They’ve got a screenshot of it, so you can still see how silly it looked.
This last one was not found in source code, so it may or may not have been written by developers, but it sounds to me like it was. From Google Reader’s FAQ (bold/italics added for emphasis):
15. What are Google Reader’s system requirements?
For the best user experience, Google Reader requires an up-to-date browser. We recommend that you use Firefox (download: Windows Mac Linux) or Safari (download: Mac), but Internet Explorer will work too (download: Windows).
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