How do you target Internet Explorer in your CSS? Do you use CSS hacks, conditional stylesheets or something else?

It’s the perfect trollbait. There have been plenty of discussions about this, and I don’t mean to start a new one. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but the thing is that it’s not purely a philosophical matter. I am writing this article because I noticed there’s a lot of misunderstanding on the subject of CSS hacks.

People have been advocating three different approaches: conditional stylesheets, CSS hacks, or conditional classnames. All these techniques have their pros and cons. Let’s take a look.

Swiftfox is an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox. Swiftfox has builds for both AMD and Intel processors and is based on the most cutting edge Firefox source code available.

Help is available in the Swiftfox Forum. If you have questions or are having difficulty with any aspect of using Swiftfox please leave a post on the forum and I or one of the forum members will provide assistance.

There is now an installer available that is distro independent. It is a script that downloads and installs Swiftfox in the /opt directory and attempts to use existing Firefox plugins. The installer is probably the best way for most users to install Swiftfox. If your distro is Debian based you will want to install using the deb files as the apt repository will provide automatic updating. More info is available at the deb file page.

Existing Firefox plugins should work with no additional configuration if you use the installer or deb file. If you install using the tarball or your plugins are not working you will want to make sure plugins are located in the directory ~/.mozilla/plugins or swiftfox/plugins. If you need any help please visit the Swiftfox Forum.

IE9 is definitely better than IE8 and a step in the right direction, but I don't believe it to be a truly modern browser, and let me tell you why.

As much as we don’t like to deal with the IE bugs, we still have to face it because your boss and visitors are still using Explorer. It gets frustrating when different versions of Explorer displays web pages differently due to the inconsistent rendering engine. We typically use IE conditional comments to fix the IE issues. But there are more ways than the conditional comments…

These hacks don't validate, but are 100% safe according to CSS parsing rules.