The Bug that Blocked the Browser

Modern IE is a solid browser. Its standard compliance is on par with other major players and its developer tools are as good and sometimes even better than their counterparts in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. And yet, if you try to write a Medium story in IE, you will be greeted with a dialog asking you to use any other major browser instead. Why?

A few months ago, in August 2014, I led an effort to make Internet Explorer a Tier 1 browser. People using a Tier 1 browser get a Medium experience: they can write stories, collaborate via notes, and so on. I pushed the change, everyone was happy, and all was well in this world.

Unfortunately, our QA team noticed a weird bug when editing a story in Internet Explorer. A thick, grey rectangle would appear around our editor and cut straight through our UI. (If you look at the story I’m responding to, you can see the rectangle in their screenshot as well.) Once we confirmed the bug, we rolled back my change that made IE11 a Tier 1 browser and went to find a way to fix that issue.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only way to remove the resizable border is to make our content-editable area non-editable. This, obviously, doesn’t work for us. We then asked our contacts at Microsoft to look into the issue but have yet to hear from them. With all the great improvements Internet Explorer got in the last few years, its development is still a black box for developers: there aren’t any public bugs for us to track and there’s no way to talk to developers working on the browser directly.

So until this bug is fixed or we find a way to get around it, Internet Explorer will have to be a Tier 2 browser. This issue is not a political one: we want Internet Explorer users to write stories on Medium. The issue is purely technical. If you have a solution for it, email me and I’ll make sure to get modern IE to Tier 1 as quickly as possible.