IE is like that bad ex- you get drunk and hook up with again…

… it’s not that you forgot how bad they were. It’s that you forgot the myriad and sundry ways in which they were bad. Worse, you forgot all your coping mechanisms for dealing with them.

I’ve had the misfortune to be doing an Angular project for a client who relies entirely on IE8 still. Installing Chrome was out of the question. It’s that kind of place. So, after years away from the <insert gender-non-specific pejorative genitalia reference> that IE is, I looked up the Angular guide to dealing with IE, dutifully prepared…

… and got totally horse-whipped anyway. Some of the low-points:

• IE not only doesn’t support the `console` object, which I forgot… but it sorta-kinda half-heartedly supports it when it feels like it. But only when the console is actually open, and then maybe for a while after you have it open, which really, REALLY confuses your testers. Because your functions will simply halt when they hit a call to `console`, other than in that mysterious window. And you’re busy telling your testers to open their console and purge their cache and try all kinds of crazy things. Which works for, like, 90 seconds and then stops. And you’ve got your console open all the time, so you’re imagining all kinds of esoteric problems that could be intervening other than YOUR OWN CODE. So, be sure to purge all console statements from your code before pushing to IE and expecting normal people to use it. (Does anybody have a grunt task that’ll strip them during `build`?)
• IE does support XHR, but not all of it. Remember the good old days before `onload`, back when you had to muck around with `onreadystatechange`? Yeah, those days are back with IE8.
• Just forget about anything involving `.innerHtml`. And forget about any frameworks or widgets that might secretly make use of it.

One of my big takeaways? I’m *not* too good to have JQuery in my projects. We try hard to get rid of JQuery on Angular projects, to remind us to avoid JQuery-style thinking about imperative DOM manipulation. If you’re messing with IE<9, just put it back in there. (Be sure it’s version 1.x.)

Another: CHROME FRAME.

Another: What the hell is this? 2006?

Finally: If you’re developing for AngularJS, be sure to consult the Angular Dev Guide for IE, and just don’t mess around with trying to make your directives into elements. Slap attributes on <div>s, and be done.