The Browser that Fixed the Bug

“It seems we’re back at square one.” This was the conclusion of my project to enable editing for Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 users.

A week earlier we published a post explaining why Internet Explorer had to be a Tier 2 browser even though we really wanted to level it up. The problem was with the browser adding a grey border to any child of a content-editable element that was responsible for arranging and sizing its own contents. That meant many elements of our editor — such as image grids or pull quotes — were triggering that border on a regular basis.

To work around the issue we would have to move all sizing to the outside of our content-editable element. That meant that every section would have to become its own content-editable and its own little editor. That would require us to almost completely re-architect and re-write the Medium editor. It seemed like we were back at square one.