Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Just when you start to get surprised at some of the complicated pages that IE7 can render flawlessly, you bump into another almost trivial page which the browser laughably fails on. I think I need to add some more tags for categorising my blog posts, as I don’t want to spend longer than necessary answering the question “Is this IE bug the same as one I’ve already reported?” It appears this one is new, though, so I will write it up. I should say that the bug does not affect Firefox, and I only found it after noticing that IE7 did not have the styling I expected for a piece of popular third party code. Admittedly I can’t state exactly how popular the code is, but it was at least of significant enough size that I did not want to consider maintaining a fork. The good news is I managed to work around the bug in this case with a one line fix, but that is largely to do with the nature of the page, not by finding a universal solution.

Freedom is its own reward, but it shouldn’t be surprising that choosing Freedom leads to many unexpected positive side-effects. For instance, Miro is designed to make online video more democratic, allowing anyone to become a publisher and anyone to subscribe to any publisher, without central control, but by embracing this model, users of Miro, if they are like me, find that they have access to refreshing new creative works, that change how they view media. It’s like the jump from TV to PVR, and the jump from closed source to “open source” (or at least shareware) all in one go. That is why suddenly going without it because of an upgrade to a separate program (especially after paying for a greater download cap from your ISP) can feel jarring. If you have found that Miro crashes at the end of each video (or just errors tens of times at startup) then my findings might be relevant to you.