IE8, should I start 'fixing' sites yet?

[Markus123]

Hey,

When building a site I'm always fussy that it looks as close to identical in all the major browsers IE6/7, Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, Opera 8+ while sticking to XHTML 1.0 compliance, and avoiding 'hacks'.

Today I was a little shocked when I downloaded IE8 Beta 1, went to one of my sites which works in all the browsers mentioned above and IE8 completely butchers it.

Would you say now is a good time to start 'fixing' sites for yet another version of IE or do you think they're likely to change/break things again in the upcoming betas/final release?

Any opinions would be appreciated! Shame, IE7 seemed a step forward but IE8 appears to render sites more like IE5.

 

[huppy]

I wouldn't worry about sites not working in a beta version.

You might spend 2hours per site fixing each problem, and then in the next beta release find that you completely wasted your time.

Only bother once the release version is out.

 

[Monkeynut]

perhaps if the IE8 final still renders wrong display a message telling the user to get a compliant browser?

What's the point of having to juggle your site compliance between how IE sees the internet and everything else? (not trying to sound rude)

 

[Tripnologist]

IE8 is supposed to be completely standards compliant when it's released. If your site currently works in Firefox and Opera/Safari (I find these two generally render pages the same), it should be fine in IE8.

 

[EternityEight]

perhaps if the IE8 final still renders wrong display a message telling the user to get a compliant browser?

What's the point of having to juggle your site compliance between how IE sees the internet and everything else? (not trying to sound rude)

Becuase IE still has a massive majority and you will lose all your traffic when that massive majority 'upgrades' to IE8

 

[simisker]

Sounds like a byproduct of IE8's Version Targeting to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Version_targeting

I don't know what the beta 1's default state is [the Microsoft IE team reversed their initial decision, which was 'legacy mode unless told otherwise' - the possible reason for you seeing your site crunch]; it's possible that Beta 1 was released before this decision was reversed, in which case you'll need to add the appropriate code if you want to see it properly in 'Standards' mode IE8.

Having said all that, like huppy I wouldn't worry about it until the final version is in use.

 

[Sic]

IE8 is supposed to be completely standards compliant when it's released.

hahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahaha!

You know it won't be. There'll be something ridiculous about it, like it won't support Javascript or something.

I downloaded the beta and it totally messed up a site I was working on at the time so I thought I'd leave it until it was properly released. I heard somewhere that they're allowing a meta tag that switches the rendering engine to IE7s, so if it's wildly different, you should just be able to use that meta tag.

 

[unwashed potato!]

just a wonderging, have you used any conditional statements that say if ie or if greater then ie6 then use this stylesheet?

just if you have then it may be that ie8 is using stylesheet for ie7 or even ie6 and not the correct one it should be using?

probably unlikely but just thought i'd ask

 

[HTMLHugo]

ie 8 beta 1 is standards compliant as standard but this can be turned off, i would imagine it will be released the other way around however.

 

[JamesU2005]

I read somewhere you can add a tag into the HEAD that will render the site in IE7 mode when viewing in IE8 incase there are any problems.

 

[Markus123]

Ah yeah I forgot you could force IE7 emulation via:

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

Might just stick that in the sites for now, although no doubt there will be some bug with that in the final release causing that to not work properly.

Hopefully they'll fix the rendering problems so you won't have to emulate IE7 though because at the moment I'm not impressed with their supposed IE8 "standards compliant" mode since it renders completely different to every other real standards compliant browser.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

 

[unwashed potato!]

it renders completely different to every other real standards compliant browser.

afaik the other browsers arent standards compliant either, just closer to it then say ie6 was. may be wrong but thats what i have heard

 

[Sic]

they're not current standards compliant because CSS3 has come out since the last big load of browser versions

 

[unwashed potato!]

they're not current standards compliant because CSS3 has come out since the last big load of browser versions

are they css2 standards compliant then? i could have sworn they were still not compliant just much better then ie's attempt.

also just wondering why do some browsers (maxthon, browzar) base themselves on ie when it is so bad? i can only assume it is because ie is pre-installed on all machines but would have thought there is ways around this?