I just added a hack to this page for IE.

  <!--[if IE]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" title="IE Bugs" href="css/iebugs.css" type="text/css" />
  <![endif]-->

That calls an extra stylesheet only for IE. The stylesheet hardcodes the width of the Google search button. For some reason, IE insists on adding space to both sides of the text on the button, which makes the button much wider than it needs to be. Combined with IE’s poor CSS support, the wider button stretches the gray sidebar. That throws off the spacing of the whole page.

It only took a couple minutes, and that’s still time that shouldn’t have been spent on it. The code is a hack to get around an IE bug. It most likely won’t work well with non-default settings. That’s what you get with hacks for a browser that doesn’t work right – partial implementation that sometimes works. If you don’t want to deal with this hack and others like it, either pester Microsoft until they fix the bugs, or use a browser that doesn’t have these bugs, like Firefox.

I was checking out my site stats for some other stuff, and decided to check on the browser usage. While this site tends to be more pro-Firefox than your average site, I know there are quite a few people who visit this site who don’t care about what browser they use, so long as they have an “Internet” icon on their desktop. Just found the results interesting…

For comparison, here’s May’s graph.