Tech & arts from Boise, Idaho. Best at 14.4K.

I’ve been a web developer for a while (1998.) In the past year I’ve been focusing on web development again, developing apps for physicians who work with a span of 6 years of browser technology (and until recently, 12 years.) It’s challenging work, and sometimes I want to throw Internet Explorer, the user agent, out the window!

But detecting user agent hasn’t been the right way to deal with browser quirks since IE7 (6 years ago), and not really since IE6 (12 years ago.) The user agent isn’t the quirk, the quirk is the quirk, and if you’re going to beat a quirk you have to understand the quirk, not understand user agent strings.

Internet Explorer provides forward guidance and methods to avoid enterprise-deployment compatibility behavior that have nothing to do with user agent string. This is how you reduce quirks of old versions of IE en-masse. Then you focus on the quirks that are left. We’ll have fewer and fewer as the Internet Explorer team gets better and better at adhering to & advancing standards.

I think IE 11′s rumored user agent string should include “like Gecko, now get over it.”

Also: A foxy quote about WebKit, the core of Chrome & Safari, which started the “like Gecko” thing, I believe.

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You’ve installed Windows 8 on a MacBook Air using Boot Camp, but the trackpad just doesn’t work like it did in OS X!

There are a number of things I’ve found^* that make it better, and they’re all free. I’m quite happy with the trackpad after following these steps:

First: You installed Apple’s drivers for the trackpad, right? Check in Windows’ Device Manager: under “Human Interface Devices” you should see “Apple Multitouch” and “Apple Multitouch Mouse.” If these aren’t there, download the “support files” (drivers) using Boot Camp Assistant (a Mac app designed to make downloading drivers take longer than it should) onto a USB/flash drive, and then run “setup.exe” from the downloaded files under Windows.

Use Apple’s Boot Camp Control Panel:

1. Hit Windows + W (er, Command + W) to search in settings, type “Boot Camp” and hit Enter/Return.
2. Answer “Yes” to the question about whether you want to let this app have its way with your computer.
3. In the resulting “Boot Camp Control Panel” switch to the “Trackpad” tab. Here you’ll find a number of rudimentary settings specific to the MacBook Air’s trackpad.

I like “Tap to Click”; the MacBook Air’s trackpad is too stiff for click-to-click. There seem to be circumstances where the option doesn’t appear to work; I’ve noticed before you login you still have to click-to-click. Earth to Apple: touchscreen MacBooks would not suck.

Reverse the vertical and horizontal scroll directions (for “Naturists” only):

1. Hit Windows, type “Regedit” and press Enter/Return.
2. Answer “Yes” to the age-old question.
3. Expand the tree on the left side of Regedit through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, Enum, HID.
4. You should see a number of items under HID that start with VID. Expand each of these until you can see each’s Device Parameters… some will have it, some will not.
5. Click each Device Parameters.  If on the right side FlipFlopWheel is shown, double-click FlipFlopWheel, type “1″ (without the quotes) in place of “0″ and click OK. This fixes vertical panning. Do the same for FlipFlopHScroll if you want horizontal panning au naturel.
6. Restart the computer (Windows + I, Power, Restart.)

Update: In the comments Glauco mentioned an app that automates the process I describe here. Check it out!

Make scrolling & panning less touchy

1. Hit Windows + W to search in settings (er, Command + W), and type “scrolling.”
2. From the search results click “Change mouse wheel settings”
3. Change the number of lines and number of characters settings to 1. (Mine were at 3.)

Please let me know if any of these helped, or if you run into trouble.

 * The MacBook model I tried this with is a 13″ late-2011 MacBook Air running Mountain Lion.

** I tried Trackpad++, an alternative to the Apple driver, a few months ago. Although it provided some additional options, which you may need if the steps above don’t do it for you, it was more downside than upside. Whereas what I do now, the steps above, are all upside.

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