I just went to our main company website, Medicology, and there was a large white semi-transparent block over the top of the entire screen. Since I use something like this for displaying AJAX content I panicked a bit and then dived into my JS and CSS files to see what was going on.
After finding nothing out of the ordinary I searched the entire set of source files for “alpha” hoping to to find a snippet of CSS that was causing my woes. Unfortunately it came back with nothing. I then decided to do the same with the source from one of the pages in Firefox and came back with a div at the bottom of the page with the ID “ga_shade”.
A quick Google led me to find that it is Google Analytics placing it there as part of the whole “content overlay” thing they do. Problem is that I wasn’t using content overlay and as such the menu bar for it wasn’t available and I couldn’t turn it off, let alone click on any links. Not happy. And suprised that Google can make slip-ups of this kind.
Sort yourselves out boys. Don’t just assume that because it works in IE6 it works in everything – try testing stuff in FF for us.
We have several sites we’ve been developing for a range of conferences we are running (Safeguarding and Q, G & E being two) and to help reduce the development time, our designer used a few PNGs so that we could use a standard layout template and then alter a CSS sheet to create a new site. This plan was working well until I finally found some time to do a bit of housekeeping and checked Google Analytics.
I was quite shocked to find that almost half of our users are still visiting us with the rediculous IE6, complete with it’s security flaws, lack of compatibility and other problems. The main problem in this instance is the lack of proper support for PNGs and in particular, alpha transparency. This was causing our nice design with the rounded corners to be displayed as big blocks of light grey all over the place.
Apart from the slight anoyance that the only reason these people are still on IE6 is because they are ignoring or not using Windows Update, and are therefore probably part of a Botnet, it means that IE’s awful legacy is still with us and is likely to be so for some years to come until these PCs finally die. We therefore STILL need to code all our new sites for IE with all the hacks and tweaks we’ve been using in the past.
In this case I found an off the shelf solution that worked quite well for us in the excellent SuperSleight that for us, allowed us to keep most our PNGs with the transparency enabled and just change a few of the core images. I never did look two hard at why all the PNGs weren’t fixed (we replaced the logo with a JPEG) but maybe your site will be fixed without a hitch.