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Ensuring Your Web Applications Work with Internet Explorer 8

Kevin Walker

Implementation Have you checked your company's web properties using Internet Explorer 8 yet?  You should....

Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was officially released by Microsoft on March 19, 2009 for all Microsoft’s major platforms in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. The new release has a host of new features that will make the end-user experience better. It also has some changes that may mean some existing sites will not function correctly.

New Features

Some of the new features added in IE8 include:

• InPrivate - Three main features: InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscription allowing users to take advantage of privacy features.

• Accelerators – Users can now highlight text, click on the blue Accelerator icon and obtain driving directions, translate and define words, email content to others, search with ease, and more.

• Web Slices – A web slice is a small section of a web page that can be added directly to your Favourites Bar.

• Address Bar – As you type the address bar will search across History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds, displaying matches from the website address or any part of the URL.

• SmartScreen Filter – Improved phishing filter.

• Developer Tools - Tools that allow HTML, CSS and JavaScript debugging directly from the browser.

• Automatic Crash Recovery - If the browser crashes, web pages can be recovered when the browser is restarted.

• Zooming – Adaptive Page Zoom improves upon traditional zoom-in/zoom-out functionality.

• Many More! - See www.microsoft.com/ie8/ for more information.

Standards Compliant

For years developers have had to work around some rendering issues in IE7. The web development community has developed a set of well known hacks to accomplish certain layouts. Internet Explorer 8 has been promoted by Microsoft as having stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. IE8 is fully compliant with the CSS, Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) specification and supports some features of CSS Level 3 (CSS 3). As a result certain pages that have used IE7 hacks may not function correctly in IE8.

Version Targeting

Web developers can force IE8 to render a page in IE7 mode (“strict mode”) by adding the following code to the page:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7”>

Existing Web Properties

As of the April 2009, IE8 already had 4% of the browser market share. IE8 will be the default browser in Windows 7 and you can expect that additional users will switch to IE8 as it becomes installed via Windows Update.

Web developers should immediately begin testing their web properties to check for incompatible pages. Automated tools such as Browser Cam (www.browsercam.com) can be used to take snapshots of web pages in a wide variety of browsers.

New versions of web browsers are being released frequently and altogether new browsers are constantly emerging. It is no longer prudent to believe that your web application will continue to function for multiple years without intervention. The Application Renewal Program ensures that your applications will always be ready for the most recent browser versions. As part of the program Agora will update web applications quarterly to ensure that they meet the following requirements:

• The application will function with the most recent versions of the most popular browsers on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

• The application is compatible with the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, Flash, QuickTime, and other popular browser plug-ins.

• Application controls are refreshed with the latest version of the vendor’s controls.

Kevin Walker is Technology Director and a founder of Agora. He can be reached at kwalker@agorainc.com