Okay, first I'd like to say that most commercial sites are visited by non-commercial regular folks, most of whom use their generic store bought windows computers with pre-installed internet explorer as the their browser. This explains why apx. 70% of our 128.000 monthly page hits come from IE users, which also means that anything online that's developed for "commercial" web usage should first and foremost be developed with that in mind ... and not with FF in mind (which I, like most professionals use most of the time). Ask yourself this question: Should your site look perfect for YOU, or should your site look perfect for the majority of your commercial customers/shoppers?
This said, I found a bug today that I could not fix. It's probably something simple but I gave up after a copuple of hours fiddling with some of the css files and template files. In FF everything works great, but not with IE7 and IE8.
So, here's the problem ....
As I was testing our custom design (only color & image changes, nothing else), I sent myself 4 test messages. One forwarded standard message with several lines of text, and three other messages with anywhere from 2 to 6 words in the message body, basic stuff like: test message ... this is a test to myself ... etc.
Well, when you click on the message with 2 words in the body ... it appears below where it can be read exactly that wide, about the widths of those two words. Can't even read all of the message header. When you click to read the message with 4 or 5 words in the body, same thing ... the window with the text opens up just wide enough to show those 4 or 5 words. This looks utterly ridiculous if your background colors aren't all identical everywhere. As soon as the message text covers an entire line, everything is fine and the window with the message shows up full width. You also receive the full width view when you click on the red symbol in order to view the message in a new window, no problem there with IE or FF. However, many if not most people would never use that feature ... much less enjoy "being forced" to use it. The pane with the message content should always show such content in full width by default, regardless how many (or few) words are being used in the content. So as far as I'm concerned, that's a bug.
Number two ... the senders name in the preview pane ...
Right above the messages list where you have sender, date, subject, etc ... if the senders name is too long for that space it wraps into a second line with IE7 and IE8. This too looks totally retarded, especially if you have 6 messages in the preview pane where 2 or 3 of them have messages with long sender names. Makes the whole thing look very cluttered and unprofessional. This doesn't happen in FF3 ... if the senders name is too long, the part that's too long simply disappears and the rest of the line looks neat & symmetrical, in sync with all of the other sender names in the message list box. These two items really ought to be taken care of. I'd do it if I could, but my coding knowledge is limited. Can't imagined though that those two items would be a major problem ...
Greetings from Germany
