Min-Height Bug in IE 7

Let me first state for the record that I’m a Firefox user. I’m sure I’ve lost enough street cred by admitting I’m a Windows user. Honestly, my primary browser is Firefox. That said, I still have to support Internet Explorer in my day job.

As I’ve recently discovered,Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t handle the min-height property in CSS in the same way. For example, I manage a website at work that is stable for the most part. I didn’t develop the style-sheets for this site, but I know enough about what is going on. Recently, a user came to me and told me that when they did a print preview in Internet Explorer 7, IE would act as though it was going to print hundreds of pages, rather than the three that were actually there. In Firefox, everything is fine. After much headache, it turns out min-height is the problem. Anything above a min-height or 900 px or so and IE chokes on Print Preview.

For exemple, we have a div that contains most of the page and we have the following code (css in-line for demo purposes only):

<div id=”container” style=”min-height=1200px;”>

Firefox has no problem with this. If you do a Print Preview in IE 7, however, it will choke. If you change from min-height to height it will work. I’m not sure how standards compliant this is, though:

<div id=”container” style=”height=1200px;”>

Anyhow, if you’re having trouble with printing in IE, you might want to take a look at your style-sheets and see if you have any elements with a large min-height.