On Tuesday I eagerly downloaded the new version of Internet Explorer, hoping that this version would be a turning point for the browser. I hoped this might be the end of IE’s inconsistencies, the start of Microsoft conforming to web standards, and the death of IE-specific style sheets.

So I’m just writing a very quick post about a bug I have found while testing a client’s site - large blocks of text were missing. After spending a while trying to figure it out, I managed to get the text to appear by removing the ‘font-family’ declaration.

font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Then by removing one font at a time from the declaration, I realised that using Helvetica was causing the problem.

So, I fixed the problem with the following declaration in the HTML head:

              
<!--[if IE 9]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="ie9.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8" />
<![endif]-->

            

and the following in ie9.css

              
body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; }

            

So, my advice to you is to avoid Helvetica, or better still, avoid Internet Explorer.