Best Internet Explorer Troubleshooting Memories

In honor of IE retiring tomorrow June 15, let's talk about our best (or worst depending on your point of view) troubleshooting experiences with Internet Explorer.

One of my first tasks at my first web development job was to make sure another developer's site was working in IE 7, 8, and 9. We had an old Windows XP desktop in a corner of the dev room specifically to test IE versions and I probably spent 20 hours fixing issues on that site, hacking through floats and z-indexes and fixing random JavaScript issues (or leaving them alone if the site still seemed to be working). I had always heard about IE being bad but didn't really get it, but after that task... I finally understood.

I haven't worked in IE for a while now and much like how we used to use CSS floats for layouts, I'd almost forgotten how much more tedious troubleshooting CSS used to be.

As an aside I will say that despite all the dunking we like to do on IE, they had smart people working on the browser and the origin of CSS grid came from the IE team so it wasn't all bad in the later years.