How many have tested their site with IE8?

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How many have tested their site with IE8?

.. And does it break?

Wlauzon

3:17 pm on May 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

It appears that IE8b1 is now the most standards compliant browser. (bearing in mind that it is still in beta).

How many of you have tested your sites, especially if you used any CSS hacks - and with what results?

poppyrich

10:16 pm on May 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

I would advise NOT actually "testing" your site with IE8 at least until the next Beta. Having spent quite a bit of time with it, my feeling is that it should have been labeled an alpha. I'm not alone in this.
If you do check out your site with IE8 beta in IE8 standards mode, take what you see with a grain of salt, for now. It might look different in a month or two.

Wlauzon

2:27 am on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the info, I have not installed it, wanted to get some feedback to see if it was worth it yet - apparently not.

dakuma

3:04 am on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

I've been using it for a few weeks now and wow it sure does break a lot of sites! I've pretty much been using it on IE7 Emulation mode since day one. Definately hope the next release does in fact change things lol :)

Wlauzon

3:35 am on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Is it breaking because of bugs in IE8, or bugs in the sites?

dakuma

3:42 am on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

I would have to guess that it's a bit of both, I've been developing sites with Visual Studio for too long I guess and some of my sites have minor alignment issues, but Google Maps is broken pretty bad currently in IE8.

vincevincevince

3:56 am on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

For now, I dynamically insert MSIE 7 compatibility meta tags into my sites if someone visits with MSIE 8 and encourage everyone to do the same until they have had a chance to properly test. Note the META tag must be the first thing after <head>.

When the next beta is out, I'll do the testing and see if there's a general set of rules or changes to practice which will bring consistent results in IE7, IE8, Opera and Firefox. Hopefully, many of the other members here will post their results and we can collaborate in cracking this new challenge.

ridingforlife

6:55 am on May 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

I downloaded IE8 just now... definitly didn't like it. It is Beta, but it screwed up some sites. Even in Emulation IE7, websites looked different from the original IE7.

I have XP so it treated it as a new program, so I removed it, and IE went back to IE7. I think I will wait until the betas are done and then try it out again.

henry0

12:09 pm on May 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

IE behaving as #8

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

OR
you may still force it behaving as #7

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

LunaC

6:01 pm on May 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

I gave it a short test and found it mangled some sites that were 100% standards compliant (validated without a single error in either the HTML or CSS and 100% hack free). These sites worked perfectly in Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE6.

I didn't take a long look at the reasons for the layout problems in IE 8, but my guess is that it's not calculating padding or negative margins properly. Dunno, just my guess based on a quick glance at the page's CSS.

I can't say I'm impressed by IE7 at all. I'll take another look when they ship the next beta and hope Microsoft can pull it together a bit more. If not it might be yet another version that will need to have separate style sheets with conditional 'if IE 8' tags. That's pretty disappointing considering one of the sites it mangled was one of mine, and no conditional CSS was needed for IE 7, just 6 and below.

poppyrich

2:52 pm on May 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

Before testing, make sure you've got it straight exactly how the versioning metatag works.
In IE8, doctype switching means nothing. There is no doctype switching. All the mode switching is done with the metatag.

As Henry0 wrote:

IE behaving as #8
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
OR
you may still force it behaving as #7
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

I want to add that quirks mode is triggered by:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=5" />

Time to brush up on IE's conditional comments, too. Soon, three different IE browsers will have to be accomodated - IE6,7 and 8.

sniff, sniff, sniff

MatthewHSE

3:30 pm on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

The current beta breaks a small but important part of my main site's template terribly. I can't figure out how it's doing what it's doing. From what I hear, this beta is buggy. I'm not worrying about it for now; there will be plenty of time to fix things (if necessary) when the next beta or a release candidate comes along.

Receptional Andy

3:32 pm on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

I've found the IE7 emulation to be quite buggy too - it certainly doesn't display the same as IE7 anyway!

JAB Creations

7:51 pm on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

I tested my site with IE8.

The Good: My site uses CSS1 liquid layouts that when rendered correctly are pixel-perfect. For example the content and sidebar have a width ratio of 80/20 (I think offhand). Inside the sidebar the child divisible and form elements have a 1px border and then 1px of "padding" that is really the margin of next-child elements. Eventually you get to form inputs and buttons which I render as block-level elements. I'm very happy to say that IE8B1 perfectly renders my super-strict super-standards compliant layout. I think I had to add a clear property to a div element on my homepage.

The Bad: Since my site uses a large number of selectors IE8B1 allows interaction with my website at a very reduced speed, as if you were on a Pentium 2 with 16MB of RAM, heavily infected with spyware, while running Windows Vista. Yeah I know slightly an overstatement, but only slight. ;)

Obviously they will get around to fixing this.

The Ugly: We will most likely not see application/xhtml, SVG, and/or any useful CSS3 support added. So essentially it will still come in fourth place after Opera as far as support for useful features.

- John

SuzyUK

10:08 pm on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

not even looked, though have had some reports

it's an alpha, personally I'm expecting another reversal of the meta tag switch before we get a release..

[edited by: SuzyUK at 10:09 pm (utc) on May 9, 2008]

StoutFiles

12:06 am on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Runs just fine for me...from the looks of other sites though I think I just lucked out.