Every web developer knows that IE is a wild beast! We finally tamed it! Starting yesterday Clipperz online password manager supports Firefox, Opera and eventually Microsoft Internet Explorer. Giulio and IE have been fighting for several weeks, but now it’s over and you can enjoy the same user experience across the three browsers mentioned above.

However IE required to rewrite several portions of code, especially to handle the direct login functionalities. If you would like to have a deeper understanding of the IE peculiarities just download the code and search for “Clipperz_IEisBroken”!

The “Add to Clipperz” bookmarklet has been another major obstacle: IE enforces a limit of 508 characters for bookmarklets, or favlets as Microsoft prefers to call them.

The current version of the bookmarklet is about 5KB long and there was no way to compress its code into 508 characters. Therefore Giulio had to write an ad-hoc version for IE that loads the code from the Clipperz site each time it is launched.

This arrangement is not ideal since the user has no direct visibility of the code activated by the IE bookmarklet. It’s a little violation of our complete transparency principle! In the next days we will elaborate on this topic.