Internet Explorer just hit the end of life — let's remind ourselves of our favourite IE hacks
Today is the day — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer just got retired.
Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15.
There is no other piece of technology that gave me more headaches in my life than IE. I’m sure many other Web Developers (or Web Masters, do you remember that?) can relate to my experience. So to celebrate this historical moment, I put together a collection of ridiculous IE hacks that we used to copy/paste all the freakin time.
- Conditional comments
- CSS Limits of Internet Explorer
- IE6, IE7 and IE8 :hover quirks
- The zoom: 1 hack
- CSS Dynamic Properties
- PNG Hack/Fix for IE 6
- 256 classes stronger than a single ID
- Double Margin Float Hack
Conditional comments
Conditional comments are the mechanism that works in IE 5 up to version 9. It was a viral technique to add IE-specific instructions or link to individual styles and scripts inside these blocks.
<!--[if IE]> Internet Explorer <![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]> Not Internet Explorer <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]> Internet Explorer 6 <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]> Internet Explorer 7 <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]> Internet Explorer 8 <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9]> Internet Explorer 9 <![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]> Internet Explorer >6 <![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 6]> Internet Explorer >=6 <![endif]-->
<!--[if lt IE 9]> Internet Explorer <9 <![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 9]> Internet Explorer <=9 <![endif]-->
CSS Limits of Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer before version 10 has some CSS limitations. However, as Eric Law (former IE program manager) explained, they are the results of early design decisions about memory allocation.
- CSS file may contain up to 4095 selectors
- CSS file may @import up to 31 other stylesheets
- HTML document may load up to 31 stylesheets
- The
@importnesting is limited to 4 levels deep - Font-family names may be up to 31 characters long
I remember using tools like Bless and Parker to analyze CSS files and chunk them up if needed.
IE6, IE7 and IE8 :hover quirks
Before version 9, IE support for :hover was limited and not consistent. Luckily, it was possible to fix this by injecting a custom behavior HTC script.
body {
behavior: url("csshover3.htc");
}
The zoom: 1 hack
This legacy property to scale elements on the page is deprecated and replaced with CSS transforms. Back in the day, putting zoom: 1 was the only method to force the browser to recalculate the layout and fix many rendering issues.
.box {
zoom: 1;
}
CSS Dynamic Properties
For some reason, Microsoft thought the best way to extend CSS functionality was to add Dynamic Properties — JavaScript expressions in the CSS stylesheet. It was a feature of IE5, IE6 and IE7.
body {
width: expression(alert("CSS in JS? Easy! How about JS in CSS?"));
}
PNG Hack/Fix for IE 6
The IE6 didn’t support the alpha transparency of PNG images. Copy/paste this one, and Bob’s your uncle.
/* for image tags */
img {
position: relative;
behavior: expression(
(this.runtimeStyle.behavior= "none") &&(
this.pngSet?this.pngSet=true: (
this.nodeName == "IMG" && this.src.toLowerCase() .indexOf(".png") >-1?(
this.runtimeStyle.backgroundImage = "none",
this.runtimeStyle.filter =
"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='" +
this.src + "', sizingMethod='image')",
this.src = "images/transparent.gif"
):
(
this.origBg = this.origBg? this.origBg:
this.currentStyle.backgroundImage.toString() .replace(
'url("',
""
)
.replace('")', ""),
this.runtimeStyle.filter =
"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='" +
this.origBg + "', sizingMethod='crop')",
this.runtimeStyle.backgroundImage = "none"
)
),
this.pngSet=true
)
);
}
/* for background images */
.elm {
width: 200px;
height: 100px;
background: url(/folder/yourimage.png) no-repeat;
_background: none;
_filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='/folder/yourimage.png',sizingMethod='crop');
}
256 classes stronger than a single ID
This hack is useless, and hopefully, you have never had to do madness like this. While working on the “CSS Specificity explained” article, I found an interesting quirk of CSS specificity in all versions of Internet Explorer. To create a selector stronger than a single id, just chan together 256 classes 🤷♂️
<div id="id" class="class">Green text on IE</div>
/* 1 id */
#id {
color: #d3d3d3;
}
/* 256 classes */
.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class.class {
color: green;
}
Double Margin Float Hack
This one is funny — thank you, Dan, for sending this one my way (by the way, Dan is excellent dev, you should follow him). What do you think? What is the margin-left value of the .box element?
.box {
float: left;
margin-left: 20px;
}
Yes, you are right, it is 20px, but IE doesn’t care and renders 40px margin anyway. Luckily the fix is simple, but god knows why it works 🤷♂️
.box {
float: left;
margin-left: 20px;
display: inline;
}
Bye IE
Today is going to be a remembered day in the Web Design chronicle. Even though all these years of trying to provide a good experience for IE users gave us a lot of headaches, I’m glad that I remember these days. It was fun!
Do you remember any of the IE-specific hacks that you used? I’m happy to update my article with them. Until next time, keep it fun 👋
This article gives me a whole new appreciation for current day development
It was fun man, it was fun!
I remember those days too well. On top of the hacks you've mentioned, there were more of those which you could have used directly within a stylesheet:
Luckily, we don't have to use any of the above anymore. ;)
Ancient Web Developers might remember the broken box model affecting IE5 and IE5.5 (the fix was similar to the last example above). At least IE6 triggered the quirks mode if the Doctype was missing or invalid. Sometimes it did that without obvious reasons.
Good old times! I don't miss them.
yey - now we have made up html tags on websites like youtube and even on spec pages for html5 - lets go backwards until we support the layer tag again. also we now have full support for propietary tags -webkit aanyone? and yet years before we'd have been castigated for using filter:progid hmmmmm and yet years later we find filter albeit in a different form in css level3. go figure. Still, we were lucky enough to have support for vertical text in CSS, page-breaking in CSS print and support for ruby tag and text years before they were adopted in the CSS and html spec (some in slightly different form) in Internet Explorer