Fire I have had it up to here (imagine my hand on my head) and I am ready to fire the damn QA department for my blog. Unfortunately I am the QA department, so things will be a little awkward around here till I find a replacement willing to take zero pay with no benefits.

I read this recent post on The Joy of Code that describes how to defer the execution of a javascript that is slowing down the rendering of your site.

So I go ahead and try it out, test in Firefox, and deploy to my hosting provider. The next day, I notice that hits to my site are way down. Strange. Everybody must be taking a break from blogs.

It wasn’t till today that a kind soul sent me an email saying my blog acts funny in IE.

Funny? I’ll say. Visitors using IE would get a scripting error and then see my Flickr Badge. Only my Flickr badge.

I have gotten so comfortable with Firefox that I completely forgot to test in IE, which the majority of web users are still using. It is fun to be on the bleeding edge, but never forget your audience. In the meanwhile, I am going to try and patch things up with my QA person because there are no resumes coming in.

UPDATE: As far as I can tell, the reason IE broke and not FireFox is that IE seems to actually honor the “defer” attribute while Firefox ignored it. This was not a bug in IE, but a bug in my head in applying the defer to scripts that should not have defer applied. And the Joy of Code article warned me too.