Internet Explorer Sucks

Okay so I won't go that far to say how much it really sucks, because I still use it, and I haven't really made the big leap to Firefox just yet. But let me tell you why it's caused me a bit of grief lately...........

So I had to investigate why some of our custom error JSP pages weren't displaying properly in our yet-to-be-released app called Soprano Clinical Documentation. When an exception is thrown, instead of showing the entire scary stack trace on the page, a custom error page is shown that displays the error in an easy to read, user-friendly format. Now the good thing is that one of the existing custom error pages was working, so I copied the content of the existing page into the problematic JSP pages. Booyah, it fixed the problem, but why???

After many hours of debugging and a bit of googling, it turns out that IE cannot display custom error pages if the page is less than 512 bytes. All I had to do was to add some cruft to it in order to fill up the page so that it is at least 512 bytes. Now how the hell was anyone supposed to know that???

3 points:

• Make sure your error pages are at least 512 bytes.
• Develop your web apps for both IE and Firefox.
• IE sucks.