There’s a bug in Internet Explorer that causes HTML elements to randomly “disappear.” Without going too much into detail, there’s two ways to make something not show up in a webpage using .css style. You can either: 1) set visibility: hidden; or 2) set display: none;

They’re slightly different, because if you set the visibility to hidden, it will still “take up space” on your page and push other elements out of its spot. If you set the display to none, everything kind of collapses around it.

I spent a TON of time debugging Javascript today (and in the past) trying to figure out what FireFox, Safari, and Opera showed 4 elements that had been set visibility: hidden; and then back to visibility: visible;, but in Internet Explorer 6 AND 7, only two of the four would reappear.

Agonizing frustration: am I breaking something minor that only shows in picky IE? Did I misspell a tag or function somewhere? Even worse, if I trigger the SAME FUNCTION in IE using a different control, the stupid elements show up!!!! Curse you, Bill Gates!

Finally, in desperation, I do another Google search.

They said to try using display: none; instead, because IE has a visibility bug. I do. It works. (*&#$ Microsoft, get your stuff together. I hope IE8 fixes all this crap, but I’m afraid my hopes aren’t set very high.