Just some painful web lessons I thought I'd share for similarly-beleaguered web developers who are wondering if their browsers (or their clients' browsers) are possessed of evil spirits.

Blank Page, No Errors in IE 8

A fraction of IE8 users reported a blank white page with no errors and a "done" loading message. It was completely unreproducible in any of my VMs, but through some searching, I found others suggesting the problem was tied to Compatibility View. When IE8 was released, my boss asked me to find a way to get rid of the IE8 Compatibility button, so I was using <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge" /> in my templates to force ultra-super-futuristic behavior (under the theory that IE is *always* behind the times). However, one of the pages had no doctype (see prior Web Tricks for why that was necessary and not within my power to remedy). And apparently the combination of those two (future spiffiness and pathetic quirks mode past) freaks IE8 out... or about 1% of IE8, at least. And thus... the oh-so-helpful blank page.

Anyway, removing the X-UA-Compatible meta tag fixed it. You could also set it to IE=7 or IE=EmulateIE7, but at that point I figured I'd leave the choice to the user on that page. If you already don't have X-UA-Compatible set, look for the Compatibility View button in the client browser and change it for the problem page.

More reading on Compatibility View: FarukAt.eş: IE8 and the X-UA-Compatible situation and IEBlog: Just The Facts: Recap of Compatibility View.

Firefox Hover Missing In "Quirks" Mode

On the same page, we noticed that the hovers were not behaving as expected in Firefox. Turns out, when you are in Quirks Mode (the no-doctype mode), Firefox does not support CSS :hover on list elements. You didn't know Firefox even had Quirks Mode? Me too. I thought that kind of asinine behavior was reserved for IE, but apparently Firefox has jumped on that mess. Joy.