So it’s been a while since my last post, but I had a moment today (actually more like 5 hours) that I couldn’t help but share. Normally these kinds of posts are directed at IE6, sometimes IE7, but this particular time was IE8. Being a front-end developer, IE8 was actually a breath of fresh air. It normally works without too many issues. But today, my confidence in Microsoft’s new product just dropped about 40% (give or take).

Over the last week or so, I’ve been creating a fairly large custom jQuery plugin at work. Up until this morning, things had been running quite smoothly. Surprisingly smooth in fact, so I guess I had this coming. At about 9am, IE8 just stopped working with my script. It was giving me a general error: “Object does not support this property or method.”, which would be fine, except that the error (according to IE) was coming from jQuery itself. Not my code.

Now being the wise guy that I am, I have more confidence in the work of people such as John Resig and the jQuery team than I do myself, not to mention I’m pretty familiar with IE’s lack of ability to produce a descriptive error, I decided not to blame them and try and gut my code to figure out the issue.

Literally 5 hours later, after replacing just about every single line twice, I decided it was time to go back to some old code and work my way up again. So that’s what I did. I grabbed a previous version and started slowly and methodically copying the new code over and every time checking to see if IE was throwing me the error again. I did this until both files were EXACTLY THE SAME. And guess what? IE magically worked. Apparently it didn’t like my old file.

If I had only known to copy the code into a new file and save over it, I would have saved myself about 5 hours. Thanks IE. You owe me one. Or five.