New year... same IE

A bit late to the party but Happy New Year! Welcome to 2019 where anything is possible, apart from changing Internet Explorer. A constant frustration in the web developer world and bane of a lot of problems.

The polyfills, the ponyfills, the ‘we need to hack it for IE’ fills. One day this will be over and I can sit down on clouds with a lovely tea (with no sugar) and contemplate on the bad times and look forward to the future and the potential of using new proposals.

When you are your own boss you can bend the rules to your heart's content and use what you want when you want but when the client has asked her it to work on this browser, my hearts sinks slightly and my current work at Codeweavers really highlights this.

Moving away from IE10 has put us in a better place and I am happy to FINALLY use flexbox in production. It feels great to finally flex (pun intended) my skills on the CSS layout front and create near pixel perfect designs. I feel when doing so I am still not getting the most of out it, as on the horizon is CSS Grid. fortunately and unfortunately I have used it: fortunately I have used it because its a great way of styling layout. The names are intuitive and the ‘grid-template-area’ is a great way of defining where classes/elements should be on the page, it reduces file size considerably, I find it to be 90% reduction in size. I have unfortunately used it because I know how good CSS layout can be, the ‘@support’ in CSS is not what i would like it to be and it results is more frustration having to flex everything on the page, which could lead to a slower page responsiveness.

My final thoughts are as follows: CSS Grid is awesome and I will be putting out a tutorial on that soon. Flexbox is great and a relief for those developers who had to support IE10. The @supports usage is backwards as I want to code as little as possible and using seems to be hard as both solutions need to work together. Lastly I cannot wait to stop supporting IE11.