Good move!

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html

Until today all MOOdalBoxes i used were triggered by simply clicking a link on a page. But today i needed to load a MOOdalBox window on page load. The screen represented some sort of QuickStart menu. Which can be disabled. I had no idea how to trigger the MOOdalBox from javascript. But once i read through the source. It became clear that it should be as easy as calling:

MOOdalBox.open(url, title, sizes);

This kept giving me the following error:

this.overlay is undefined

Looking through the MOOdalBox source. I noticed the this.overlay property was set inside the init() method. So let’s try that before we call the open() method.

MOOdalBox.init();
MOOdalBox.open(url, title, sizes);

This actually worked. I was pretty happy with the result. untill i opened IE 7 to test the same page. Nothing happened. No error’s and no MOOdalBox. Let’s try something else. Whenever i need to load something on page load in IE i use the window.onload method.

window.onload = function()
    MOOdalBox.init();
    MOOdalBox.open(url, title, sizes);
}

Now the overlay was loaded. But still no MOOdalBox on top of it. I figured it had something to do with the DOM not being fully loaded. But i couldn’t really think of a solution. So of to Google. After a bit of browsing i found somebody with the same problem. And a reply from the original author of MOOdalBox. Add a domready event to make it work.

window.addEvent('domready', loadMOOdal);
function loadMOOdal() {
    MOOdalBox.open('Quickstart/load', '', '700 500');
}

This did it. And my only goal was to make it function properly inside of IE 7. but this also fixes the same problem for IE 6. So a big thanks to Răzvan for creating MOOdalBox and for supplying the fix.

But when i have to build a design. I need to check al those browsers. So i have Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer installed. The problem with internet explorer is that you can’t run multiple versions on the same machine. Well at least not without a long hacking session. To solve this problem most of the time i used something like Virtual Machine or Virtual Desktop. The problem is that applications like that eat memory. And there is always the minor annoyances with losing focus on my IDE because the VM window is still active.

Some time ago. My coworker Bart send a link to a tool called IETester. This nice little (24mb) tool let’s you run multiple versions of Internet explorer on one machine. It’s possible to test pages in version 5.5 and up. even the upcomming (still in beta) version 8 is supported. At the time of writing it is still in alpha stage. But it works great. I did have some unexplainable crashes. And there are some known issue’s like:

• When resizing, the content may disappear. I am working to correct it on the next version.
• The Previous/Next buttons are not working properly
• Focus is not working properly
• Java applets are not working
• Flash is not working on IE6 instance.

Besides that it does what it’s build for. A nice tool to add to your arsenal.