A BulletProof Idea*

Micro$oft and the IE8 fiasco!

// February 21st, 2009 // Internet Explorer, browsers, microsoft

Got an interesting e-mail at work the other day from our information architect James Frost regarding Microsoft and their upcoming new browser IE8. Which follows on from a previous post I wrote a year ago.

At face value the IE7 rendering engine bundled with IE8 isn’t functionally identical to the IE7 browser. So if triggering IE7 standards mode is how sites are going to deal with IE8, then testing in both IE7 and IE8′s version of IE7 is mandatory. That is still an extra browser to support, despite the IE team’s claims.

A particularly nasty pitfall to remember is that by default, Intranets or websites running on the private range of IP addresses (e.g. 192.168.*.*) will be defaulted to IE8′s compatibility mode. So you can’t assume that a page running on your local network that works in IE8 will still work when it moves live.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that IE8′s Compatibility Blacklist essentially forces listed websites to opt into standards compliant rendering. Except today, I’m more convinced of that than ever before. Any site that could potentially be listed in the IE8 Compatibility Blacklist has no real practical choice apart from opting into a rendering mode. It’s either that, or accept the Russian roulette of the supposed IE7 rendering modes in IE8.

The only approach that makes any practical sense is for a website to explicitly opt into their chosen standards mode – the very thing we rejected one year ago. That is a difficult pill to swallow. We are clearly not ready for IE8.

James Frost

One thing I would like to add to James’ e-mail is that this couldn’t have come at a worse time during the current economic climate. The company I work for has a lot of websites which render correctly in the existing IE7 browser, what of them now? If a top level domain gets blacklisted then there could be a lot of trouble ahead. Are clients going to pay to stop their older websites getting blacklisted?