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Comment by itsboring | Hacker News Reader

IE11 has crazy regressions in keyframe animations and transitions. Stuff that worked fine in IE10 and every other browser on the planet now requires voodoo like using settimeout to delay for a magical number of ms before setting certain style properties.

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IE11 has been, in my experience, the largest source of awful, browser-specific hackery since the Galaxy S2 or Blackberry mobile browsers.

You might think that, if you've worked with IE10, it's going to be smooth sailing. It's not. IE11 is a regression in comparison.

The browser quirks aren't things like "Oh, you need a vendor prefix here." They are things like, "no matter what, keyframe animations will never work at all in the presence of the Facebook API, and transition animations will work sometimes (but not always!) because reasons, and sometimes (but not always!) animated elements will reset back to their original position after the animation completes."

Because of these browser-specific quirks, you'll be spending a fair amount of time in the IE11 developer tools, which are very nearly unchanged since interns wrote them in IE7. Worse, they frequently crash and take the browser down with it. Or, they get out of sync with the browser, and "Inspect Element" stops working until you restart the browser. You'll be restarting IE and staring at the "Searching for solutions..." dialog quite a bit.

When the tools DO work, you'll find they've added a bunch of new stuff like the "UI Responsiveness Wizard", but that's a poor consolation prize for losing the great debugging features of other browsers, like "Break on attribute modification" and "stabililty."

And, after spending days poring through JS, trying to find any sort of IE11-specific bug or behavior on these complex sites that work in very nearly every other browser, including IE10 and an array of mobile browsers going back to Android 2, you'll find that adding random timeouts will start fixing some of these weird behaviors.

I've been mired in IE11 support for the past several months. It's been a nightmare.

Oh my lord. Thanks for breaking the fragile new trust I had in Microsoft's improved embracing of the web.. They actually made it so that you now have to test and optimize for every IE version out there.

The IE vision of embracing the web is being incredibly dogmatic about "you shouldn't have to do anything special for IE" while simultaneously introducing a slew of IE-specific awful.

This is what drives me crazy with MS. They really improved IE this time around and actually fixed my biggest beef, which is the lack of decent web developer tools.

So yeah, they fixed that, then once I started using the tools, I suddenly realized they completely stripped out the Document Mode/Browser Mode so now you have to figure out some other way of testing old versions.

Oh, but wait! Browser Mode is now back in, not in an update mind you, but only available in Windows 8.1. Seriously, WTF!?

For my taste, the Web Developer Tools haven't improved at all. What have you found that is an improvement?

I think the big thing is they're very similar to Firebug and Chrome's developer tools now. Before it took an act of congress to change CSS, HTML and debug JS. Now, it's very similar to other browser's.

You can see the differences in the UI here: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/the-new-ie11-f12-tools/

Even looking at the side-by-side shots of DOM Explorer, I have a hard time telling which one is new and which one is old.

The parts that are most important to my work have largely gone unchanged, and the debugging tools I use most from Chrome and Firebug are nowhere to be found.

I'm a Microsoft engineer that worked on animations in IE10. Unfortunately, we're not aware of the IE11 regressions you experienced. Could you please share a test page that demonstrates the issue?

You can reach me at stevebe@microsoft.com.

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