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Ever since starting how&why I have hardly bought any books from MPH, Times or Popular. My head will launch an automated calculation process to determine the costs of books and the results usually prohibits me from buying. This means I only shop when books are really on sales, or when MPH or Penguin host their warehouse sales.

Yesterday was a rare occasion where I bought 2 books from MPH at a miserable 15% discount. This is one of them.

I have been working on a website, happily constructing the whole site with CSS. CSS Zen Garden happens to be one of the sites (besides Macromedia Developers’ Exchange) which I frequent a lot to see how others do their coding. I figured it is actually quite convenient to have a book as such so that I could read it anywhere, anytime, without the need of having to go online.

The other reason was that the site which I was working on gave me a shock last week. My horrible mistake was that for the few weeks developing the site I have never previewed it using Microsoft Internet Explorer. When i finally remembered to do so, the nightmares started: alignments were off, type point sizes looked awful, elegant dotted lines looked super-fat, etc etc.

Can one live without Internet Explorer? I have stopped using IE for quite a while. On my Mac, I have Safari and Firefox. On my PC, it is 100% Firefox. I can’t imagine working without Firefox.

Here is the main reason - extensions. Firefox has tonnes of useful extensions that make web-browsing efficient.

I am a super-leecher. I visit music blogs and I download all the MP3s posted. Firefox has a little extension called downthemall, which enables me to download everything that is posted on a page, instead of right-click to save each individual link.

I am a net junkie and I use at least 3 different machines everyday. I have to store my bookmarks somewhere so that I could access them from any machine. The combination of Delicious + delicious sidebar makes this possible.

I can’t just live with Google alone. I need other search engines. Firefox does that for me.

I need news. My Firefox is configured with quite a number of live bookmarks, from world news to Jeffooi, to some silly celebrity gossip blog (check out the new "pregnant" Angelina Jolie’s photos). I don’t have to visit these sites to know what’s new.

I can go on and on raving about Firefox. This post is becoming a sales pitch for you to abandon Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. (OK, Microsoft has just released a beta version of Internet Explorer 7 and I am not sure whether it is of any good, so I will still be advocating for Firefox).

Anyways, back to my newly acquired book and the site i was building. Page 87 says this:

"Unfortunately Internet Explorer for Windows doesn’t support them (absolute positioning columnar layouts), which renders them unusable for now. Pity."

The horror. Seems like I have to go back to Step 1 to rethink the coding. Ain’t really happy about that.

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Sidenote: saw this on Microsoft’s Mac page:

INTERNET EXPLORER FOR MAC NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD

In June 2003, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit announced that Internet Explorer for Mac would undergo no further development, and support would cease in 2005. In accordance with published support lifecycle policies, Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and is not providing any further security or performance updates.

Accordingly, as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac is no longer available for download from Microsoft. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple’s Safari.