Normally I wouldn’t even be using Internet Explorer, particularly not the long dead Mac version of IE 5.2. The wife still has it installed on her iMac as she needs it for one of her professional organization sites (the sheer design idiocy of which often baffles the mind). I had launched it because I was hoping to sneak past the lame ass browser sniffer used by my employer’s equally lame ass employee self serve site to check for my W2.

(I didn’t make it, as it is specifically tailored to look for Internet Explorer 6.x and that alone. Using a Firefox user agent spoofer got me through the front gates but I still was unable to access anything but a cryptic error message.)

In the process of trying to get inside I was redirected to Microsoft.com to look for a nonexistent update to my IE browser. Microsoft’s website also uses yet another lame ass browser sniffer to serve up CSS. As it turns out, not even their own ancient browser made the list and what you get when you log in using IE 5.2 for Mac is a stylesheet-free pile of poop that looks like it might have been developed for Mosaic.

Don’t happen to have the decaying corpse of IE 5.2 Mac cluttering up your hard drive? You can see a very similar effect if you try to join “The Social” over at zune.net using Camino. (Tip o’ the hat to Grotto 11’s Peeve Farm by way of Daring Fireball for that one.)