Spent 6 hours trying to fix a background tile that wouldn't repeat properly in Netscape 4

I was building a little fan site for an old band I liked back in '98 and spent almost an entire Saturday trying to get a gif background to tile seamlessly. Turned out the image had a single pixel border on one edge that I missed because I was zoomed in too far on my monitor. Has anyone else ever lost a whole day to something that dumb with old browsers?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivangrant1mo ago

Man I feel that pain deep in my bones. Spent a whole weekend once on a tile that looked perfect in Photoshop but had this tiny 1px seam in IE4. Turned out I saved it as a JPEG instead of GIF and the compression added artifacts at the edges. Netscape was even worse about that stuff, it would just show random white lines where the tiles met. Simple mistake, whole day gone, no way to get it back.

thompson.christopher1mo ago

I remember reading something about how the JPEG compression algorithm works, it stores colors in blocks so edges get blurry. That must have been a nightmare debugging that in IE4 since dev tools back then were basically guesswork. The JPEG to GIF mistake is way too easy to make when you are rushing to get something live.