It was bound to happen. Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer finally just broke. Nothing fancy, no bells, whistles or fireworks. It just died. For some unknown reason, cookies are no longer working. There are a handful that are set, and more are accepted because they keep piling up. But the ones I want to work (Observer login, Bloglines login) don’t.
So I’m done. I had installed Mozilla‘s Firefox 0.8, and with a simple “set as default” click, Internet Explorer is no more. Sure, it’s there and all. But it’s not the default, and if I can help it, I’m not even going to fire it up. So far, I’m pleased. The browsing speed is much faster than IE as far as I can tell, and I’m supporting an app that deserves the support.
There are some small problems. I’m composing this entry in Movable Type, and the little buttons that allow me to easily add italic or bold text, or define a URL, are missing. Not a big price to pay, but it would be nice if they were there. If anyone knows how to make them work, please let me know.
Update: The Movable Type buttons are easily fixed. Check the comments for the details. Thanks to Jennifer and Mark for the information on how to get there.
Comments
5 responses to “Kicking IE to the Curb”
I think you’re right. I understand that you can change what Opera sends, so that might be one option. Just include the word “gecko” in there someplace. The detection of the browser as it is set currently looks for gecko in the user-agent string sent to the server and that should resolve it.
Naturally, this would need to be done for anyone using Opera and connecting to those pages.
The other alternative is to update your MT scripts to look for “opera” instead of just “gecko”. The template used for building that page requires a particular setting (agent_mozilla) be set to display the code in question. If MT sets that parameter for Opera, then it might resolve your issue.
Look in CMS.pm for this string:
$param->{agent_mozilla} = $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =~ /gecko/i;If you’re familiar with regular expressions, you can change it to search for gecko or opera. Or just copy that line, and change the word gecko to opera. For instance:
$param->{agent_mozilla} = $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =~ /gecko/i; $param->{agent_mozilla} = $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =~ /opera/i;Updating the regular expression is probably cleaner, but either way should work. Then when it sees opera in the string, it’ll display those things as it would for gecko-based browsers.
If you want to get fancy, you could even create a new parameter name (say, agent_opera) and update your templates accordingly. This might actually be the best method, because there may be some agent_mozilla entries that don’t work for Opera (and vice-versa). But it could mean a lot of work.
unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a fix for opera.
That did the trick. Mark’s link works too, and takes you to the link in Jennifer’s comment. Thanks for the links!
Also try this, it works for me.
This is old and I’m not sure if it still works but worth a try. I had it going at one point but lost it in an MT upgrade and never replaced it (I use Zempt to post most often, anyway). Here’s the link to the Blogzilla post.