With WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 lots of things didn't work if you weren't using IE as your browser. It was especially essential to use IE for administration.

With WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 I've rarely found the need to use IE for Administration and most things just work in Chrome (and Safari for the Mac) which I use more than IE on one of my machines.

However, there's always a bit of nastiness hanging around waiting to hit the unwary.

This particular piece of nastiness was caused by my noticing that the number of items I had listed in my Books page had gone well over 200 and so page changing was necessary.

I solved that by making the limit 400 but now I had a very long page, so I decided to change Grouping to non-expanded.

That in turn led to me wanting to remove the Grouping: prefix which looked fine when the page was in expanded mode but looked ugly when you saw line after line of it.

So off to SPD 2007 and (thankfully after making a copy of Books.aspx) convert that section of the page to XSLT. Get rid of the "Grouping: " text before the Group name (and which for reasons that I can't really understand also gets rid of the (nn) after the group name!) and Save.

Go to Chrome and test. The page opens up fine and looks as it should. Luckily I then click on one of the "+"s to open one of the sections and nothing happens. Oops.

Go to IE (7 as it happens) and try that there. Yes, the "+" opens with no problems.

In SPD 2007 rename the new version and rename back the saved version. Phew, good thing I saved a copy ...

Now test again in Chrome. Now there is action when I click the "+" but not enough as all that happens is that it says "loading" and keeps on saying "loading".

Head over to IE again and refresh the page and do + there. No problems. "Loading" for a minute amount of time and then the listing for that section are there.

Back to Chrome and the section is still "loading".

So the only thing to do is either disfigure the web page with two links (one of which is marked IE only) or abandon the whole idea of having the web page non-expanded by default.

I do the latter.

It's interesting to note that when accessing v2 SharePoint in the old days in Firefox, if "non-expanded" was specified, that was ignored and the page opened in expanded mode. (Using IE it was non-expanded). Now it opens in non-expanded mode and doesn't work (in Chrome).

Which alternative design do you think is better?