IE8 is waiting in the wings
It doesn't seem that long ago since Microsoft brought out Internet Explorer 7, but another new version, IE8, is due to be released any day now. Some of you may have already spotted references to IE8 in your traffic logs, from the extensive testing we have been doing on our sites with beta versions of the program over the past year.
IE8 makes the usual claims for a new version of a browser. It will be faster, easier to use, the most secure version to date and so on. It will also include various new gadgets called accelerators, activities and web slices, although I can't say I've felt overwhelmed by any of these features. The most important issue surrounding IE8 is that of HTML compatibility. HTML is the language used to build web pages and there are well-defined standards which say how browsers should interpret HTML commands and display information on the screen. Microsoft says that IE8 will be its most standards compliant browser ever.
The problem has been that, for years, Internet Explorer has not adhered to the HTML standards and instead applied its own unique interpretation to them. Because of its market dominance, a great many websites have been built to work properly in Internet Explorer, and sort of work in other browsers, even though those other browsers were more standards compliant. Now, with IE8, Microsoft will, for the first time, work in standards mode by default, and consequently websites which were designed to exploit the quirky nature of previous versions of Internet Explorer may now find they don't look so good anymore, or worse, don't work at all.
For months now, Microsoft has been encouraging web developers to test their sites with IE8 and to fix sites which will be broken in the new browser. At Skill Zone we have long had a policy of writing browser-neutral code to HTML standards, and avoiding code which used the unique MSIE layouts. Our objective was always to write code which worked the same way in all browsers so the release of IE8 should present few problems for us and we welcome the move to standards compliance by Microsoft.
IE8 is a good browser but we have found bugs. On the Release Candidate version of IE8, (which we received a month ago), we found some severe bugs which can cause major layout problems, even for sites which are totally standards compliant and work flawlessly in IE7, Firefox and Safari. We have reported those bugs to Microsoft but whether they will be fixed in time for the final public release version of IE8 remains to be seen.
When the definitive version of IE8 is released we will download it and be busy testing all our websites again and inserting any workarounds needed for IE8. If you do hit any problems with your website as a result of you or your visitors using IE8, please do let us know.
19th March 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.