Is Your Website Comptabile with Internet Explorer 8

Almost two months ago, Microsoft released their newest version of the popular web browser, Internet Explorer 8. Recently, my Vista powered laptop had IE8 listed as an important update, so I went ahead and added it. It’s currently running on all of our Windows computers. It’s also why I’m writing this blog post.

I was checking out one of the local websites the other day and found out that it does not look like it used to under IE7. The problem is with the CSS and the footer for the background. In IE7 it stays where it’s supposed to, but in IE8 it doesn’t; it rises up the page leaving the content on top to look weird.

It's true that you can put an advertisement for Firefox on your site and suggest that people use it, but you can’t expect that to be the answer. There are many who do not use Firefox. Using our own website metrics, we can easily see that out of all browsers, 58% of our visitors use Internet Explorer. Firefox commands 32% of the market share on our site, but we still design for cross browser compatibility.

The question is, have you checked your website to see if it works in IE8? What about Opera or Safari? It’s a good idea to build your site for all browsers, or at least the major ones. A big block suggesting I use another browser to look at the site isn’t going to make me do it; it usually means I don’t bother with the site.

I know this is mostly me being on my standards compliance kick, building for maximum visibility and all that, but it’s still worth mentioning. With Internet Explorer being updated all the time, and Microsoft’s habit of interpreting scripting the way it wants, you should make sure your website works for as many browsers as you can, especially the major ones.

About Dave

I am the founder of Asheboro Creative. I'm a PHP and MySQL developer that thinks CSS is the greatest thing since the knife that sliced bread. I am a stickler for validating our websites and love to check out design galleries.

Comments

Elchin
06/18/09, 5:21am

HI thank you for u blog, I read it and it is very interesting I experience the same problem as you mentioned in u blog we had a website and it looks normal in Safari and in IE7 but some pages of website looks weird in IE8 it didn't show content some pictures is not aligned, would you please give me any advice how I can fix it our website is built on css and html.
Thanks in advance

Dave
06/28/09, 4:50am

Thanks for reading the blog, and I'm glad it's been useful for you.

It could be different things. You should check to make sure any CSS floats are being cleared properly. This could be part of it. Also, if it's not showing certain content, it could be something with the structure of divs and how they relate to each other.