Are your sites ready for IE8?
Friday, February 13th, 2009
IE8
Microsoft released a version of it’s browser Explorer under the name “release candidate”. That means, that version will be released soon and no major changes will be made anymore. You can download the IE8 release canidate version here.
There are a lot of news and it’s almost impossible to go in detail. But generally speaking the overall feeling is, that this browsers version is a major step in direction compatibility.
- One of the things to note is, that IE8 will support CSS 2.1 completly, though it’s not supporting CSS3 almost at all. So we are still far away from multiple backgrounds and so on.
- U might need to use extra rule to apply filters for IE8 (-ms-filter:) instead using the common property for IE7/6 (filter:)
- Javascript: The Javascript Framework seems to work differently then the older IE browser version. After a few test we could see that several Javascripts are not working in IE8. Now, depending on how important and how many Javascripts are used on a site, this can be very anoying. Some site’s usability can get in danger without the proper Javascript working or the Layout looks screwed up completly.
IE8 comes with several built-in engines
The good news is that IE8 comes with several built-in engines (for IE5 and IE7) to switch to. Basuically, the user can tick an option to choose if IE8 should interprete browsing like an older IE version. This though is actually great for development - a lot of standard users will not really use this option.
A second way to keep a current site safe of troubles is to add a meta tag to html head section of a site to avoid IE8 to display the site in the IE8 engine but instead with an older built-in engine. To do so add following met tag:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />
However, this is not a long term solution because it’s just a matter of time until IE8 is growing to be the most important browser out there. If you are a developer of Javascript you should start now to test and in case update the Javascript for IE8.
Note: You might use the built-in engines for testing purpose but you ‘ll still need a Standalone version for IE6. IE8 doesn’t support a built-in version for IE6.