Well, lately, IE is not the only browser to give me the blues. In fact,
all week I've been bitten by browsers handling things differently, often
just between versions of browsers.
Firefox
A page I had worked on used some absolute positioning within relative
positioned elements to achieve the proper layout (idea being to position
some buttons at the bottom of a box). It worked just fine in IE, Chrome,
FF 3+ ... but FF 4 choked. What was the problem? Well, the relative
positioned element was a table cell. Apparently, while most newer
browsers happily support this, there is no defined behaviour: see W3 for
specs.
Hence, FF 4 decided that while the table cell could be relative, the
absolute positioned elements should be positioned according to some
other element. Despite FF 3+ doing things exactly as expected.
IE
IE gave me a good chance to refresh my knowledge of HTTP status codes.
While I knew quite well that search engines will use the knowledge of
301s to avoid reindexing pages that have been moved (and also transfer
pagerank), I wasn't aware that browsers can (and will) cache HTTP
headers. Specifically, IE9 will cache 301
responses.
Now, this is actually a good thing, as it'll speed up browsing for
users. However, it means that web developers really need to remember
their status codes. If you use redirecting for login, logout or handling
POST requests to avoid problems with the back button, you need to use a
302, 303 or 307 - 301s might get cached by the browser (which actually
meant the logout function didn't work on the site I was working on). In
case you're using PHP (like I am) this note on the header()
page is good.