Whiter Than White

Posted: 06/06/12

It'll be All White on The Night

News that IE6 is virtually dead is welcome news to anyone who's ever coded a web site and then had to code it again for IE6. However IE7 is almost as bad in some respects.

I had the same IE7 bug crop up twice in the same week. I was working on some dropdown menus, and wanted the mouseover background colour to change to white, or #FFFFFF in css parlance. I had this working just fine in all browsers, except for IE7, which refused to play ball. The foreground colour was changing, but not the background which as I was inverting the colours, meant that the text became illegible.

I had stumbled into the IE7 "white" bug. It seems that IE7 can't manage to display a white background under certain circumstances. Sad, but true.

Fortunately the fix was quite trivial and worked for all browsers - use an off white instead: #FEFEFE is close enough so that it doesn't notice that it's not really white.