I think my favorite thing about being a web developer is wasting hours and hours of my time, my co-workers time, pretty much every ones time because Internet Explorer is retarded.
Earlier this week, we were developing a site and we created a new sub domain off of our main domain. Because we already had an existing sub domain for the same client, the team decided to postfix the sub domain with _new. When we started testing our work, it didn’t start off well. Open up Internet Explorer 7 and receive the login page, attempt to login and just get redirected back to the login page.
We know there is nothing wrong with our login script as it works fine in Mozilla and it’s something that we’ve used on a million other projects.
My head still hurts from banging it against the wall for quite some time to simply discover that Internet Explorer rejects session cookies when a domain contains an underscore (“_”) in the name!
I know this is the shortest article I’ve ever written, but I had to vent. Hopefully if you run into this problem you will Google it sooner than we did and this article will save you time and a headache!
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Do you realise that underscores are invalid in domains? The only non-alphanumeric characters allowed in domains are hyphens (periods aside).As such, IE has the right to behave erratically as does any other browser.
Yes, once I determined the problem was that, I said those exact words. What bothers me though is that it is not “invalid” in a sub domain, which is where we had our underscore.