Recently I posed the question at FlyerTalk soliciting suggestions for blog topics. Much to my surprise, there were a lot more technical items asked than I thought I would see. After following many of the other threads, there seem to be a lot more incorrect hypotheses regarding how we develop than I realized. It also fuels a very negative image of those behind the scenes pulling long hours dedicated to delivering enhancements.

So today, I’m going to start with my latest change to help improve the end product. What you might find interesting is that it’s through the use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Beta release. The reason for this is that up until now, fixing display issues and handling problems has been a trial and error process requiring much more development time. The best example I can provide is that while we would see that there was an error occurring with javascript, the error report was cryptic and the line number reference was never correct. As a result, my default has been to do all my development using the Firefox browser along with several developer plug-ins. Taking that approach has allowed me to get more compatibility quickly, and then some minor adjustments to handle the inconsistency of Internet Explorer. Otherwise it takes about twice the time to develop.

Well with the beta of IE8, Microsoft has added most of the features that I require for development. So I installed it onto my work laptop and am using it. Does this mean that I’m going to disregard IE6 (the baseline for support on delta.com)? Absolutely not. In fact, it means that I’ll be able to debug problems faster, reducing defects, and if I’m really fortunate, the ability to take on more.

So while my default browser is still Firefox, I cannot applaud Microsoft enough for this release and the improvements I’ve seen so far. For a beta I’m not having any issues on my work issued XP machine, nor my personal Vista machine.

drew
Senior Developer, delta.com