TimGilbreath.com

Along with the inevitable release of the full, public version of Internet Explorer 8, we as web developers will experience a simultaneous groan as our clients call about how their sites either display incorrectly or simply don’t work in the newest version of Microsoft’s browser.  We’ve started early in our testing, but the numerous hacks and workarounds needed still don’t produce the results we’re looking for.

Not to fear…IE 8 has the ability to render pages in Compatibility Mode, which emulates the rules of IE 7.  We can tell IE 8 to enter this mode by one, simple line of code within the header of our sites:

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

Save your files (or header include if you’re using include files) after putting in this line, and IE 8 will display your pages correctly.  Obviously, this only applies to problems that are a result of IE 8’s horrible rendering standards; if you screwed up a tag somewhere, you’ll still see the problem there.

Just a quick rant…on the intricacies of the available web browsers of today. After a hair-raising experience with IE 6 yesterday, it dawned on me just how bad of a deal it is for web developers every time someone gets the idea to create and release the newest and greatest browser. Chrome by Google…bad. Independent browsers? Bad. Not just for us developers, but for users as well. Wouldn’t it be nice if ONE company had ONE be-all-end-all browser, that did everything we needed it to, had extension support, and was loved by the W3C?

I know…..that’s called a monopoly. Well, if internet browsers were about the users, and not about money, that’d be ok in this situation.

Gotta run…….I have 7 browsers, 4 screen resolutions, and 3 platforms to test this new site on.