Second-cup-of-coffee

Internet Explorer and PNG hacks

I ran into an interesting (well, interesting to me in an infuriatingly frustrating kind of way) problem with a site I had worked on and Internet Explorer (6, 7, and 8). The site displayed fine but after the page displayed I could see the status bar churning away. It would chug along and I’d watch it download hundreds of mystery items. I couldn’t replicate the behavior in any other browser.

As many web developers know, Internet Explorer 6 cannot natively handle transparent PNGs but you could overcome this by using a behavior (.htc) file. In this particular site, the .htc file was being loaded regardless of the version of Internet Explorer. It was this behavior file that was causing Internet Explorer to process every PNG on the page. I put in a conditional IE statement and this solved the problem for Internet Explorer 7 and 8.