Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 was released today and, if you have not already checked your website's compatibility, you could soon be in for a nasty surprise. Site owners are being contacted by Microsoft to inform them that their sites may not be compatible with the new browser. Digital Spyders received a notification - you can read the notice and their response here.

Internet Explorer 8 Released Today

While most Standards-compliant sites will render just fine in IE 8, it's worth noting that IE 8 is designed for rendering HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1. It does have some limited support for some popular features of CSS 3.0.

What to do if the page you are viewing does not display correctly

Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the website as it would be displayed IE 7. This option is on a per site basis and all other sites will continue to display with Internet Explorer 8 functionality. To go back to browsing with Internet Explorer 8 functionality on that site, simply click the Compatibility View button a second time.

NOTE: Compatibility view does not display sites exactly the same as the native Internet Explorer 7 - remember this if you are using the view for web site development.

What to do if your own site does not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8

Look for HTML and CSS errors in your site.
Check your site for errors on the W3C Validation Tool and fix the errors it reports. Also make sure you validate your CSS.

If your site validates using these tools this will benefit all browsers. Using valid code alone will not necessarily mean your site renders correctly though.

As a temporary fix, add the meta tag below to each page of your site. If you are using WordPress add this between the <head> tags in header.php
If you are using Mambo the code will go between the <head> tags in your template's index.php

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

This tag tells IE8 to render your site in IE7 compatibility mode.

When I was testing IE 8 Release Candidates I found that some sites were triggering Compatibility View even though they were definitely Standards-compliant. This can happen for a number of reasons and is likely to happen more often, now that IE8 has been released. Microsoft keeps a master list of IE8-incompatible sites that is checked each time you use IE8.
If you are certain your site is Standards-compliant and you want to make sure visitors don't get an annoying pop-up message, just add the following meta tag between your <head> tags for each page.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=IE8" />

This will force IE8 to render your site in Standards Mode.

For Developers

IE8 has a number of new features. Including new built-in security features, designed to protect against:

Cross Site Scripting Attacks
Malware Downloads
Phishing Attacks
ActiveX Exploits

While these may provide a sense of security to end-users, there is currently no process for reporting false positives.

One of the new features in IE8 is the Developer Tools (detailed information here). They don't stack up against the add-ons you can get for Firefox but they are a nice addition. Where I found them particularly handy is with debugging JavaScript (previously, we were pretty much on our own trying to figure out why IE was baulking at scripts that worked perfectly on every other browser).
To get to the tools, press F12 or click Developer Tools from the Tools menu.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting a series of articles about how Internet Explorer 8 affects web site design. Like all versions of IE, it has its quirks and a couple of things web designers will have to get used to. Watch out for those posts.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer Incompatibility Lists

I'm updating this post with the links to the two IE8-incompatibility lists - one for Vista and one for XP. The XP list is in .xls format, which means you can open it and browse the contents without needing to install it in Internet Explorer. I cannot publish the list here due to Microsoft's copyright terms, but it makes interesting reading.

Microsoft says the list will be updated regularly. To use it in your browser you must download the appropriate list for your operating system and select, "Include updated website lists from Microsoft" in your Compatibility View Settings.

If you are like me and just curious about which sites are on the master list, open the download for XP in Excel and view. At the moment, there are 3136 domains listed!

Have you received notice from Microsoft to indicate that your site is on their IE8-incompatibility list? Do you think a browser developer should even have such a list?

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