Joe Strazzere - All Things Quality - Things To Look For When Testing Your Site With IE8

Joe Strazzere - All Things Quality

March 30, 2008 - Things To Look For When Testing Your Site With IE8

Posted in QA

If you haven't started already, you may soon need to test your web applications and web sites for Internet Explorer 8 compatibility.

We've started using the handy, Microsoft-provided, Virtual PC Images containing Internet Explorer Beta 1 pre-installed. (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en)

As I have time, I'll list some of the problematic and potentially problematic issues that I encounter here.

The release date for IE8 hasn't yet been announced. But it's believed that:

At least one more Beta is expected this year
IE8 is expected to be delivered by late 2008 or early 2009

Things I plan to consider when testing under IE8 (gathered from various sites):

The alt attribute is no longer displayed as the image tooltip when the browser is running in IE8 mode.
Internet Explorer 8 raises the number of connections per host by default, for a potential drop in page load times and increased parallelism in AJAX scenarios.
ol numbering may be wildly and weirdly off.
:first-line and :first-letter don't work.
The attributes[] array doesn't seem to have a length.
The cells[] and rows[] nodeLists don't work.
letter-spacing doesn't work in some pages.
Opacity doesn't seem to be supported.
Some CSS selectors, such as the + selector, should also work when the page content is changed by JavaScript. In IE8 they do, but only after you remove the focus from the link that changed the page content.
Connections per host increased from 2 to 6 in some cases. According to Microsoft, "Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 detects broadband connections and increases the number of connections per host to six if a high speed connection is detected. This maximum number of connections applies to any connection made to a Web server and not only to downloads."
The DEP/NX setting is enabled by default in IE8 when running under Vista, but not under XP.
IE8 provides a new Adaptive Zoom feature. Need to test with different zoom levels.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Release Notes:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787

Internet Explorer Blog Home Page

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx

IE 8 Beta Feedback:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/05/ie8-beta-feedback.aspx

Microsoft IE8 Newsgroup:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.internetexplorer.beta

MSDN Whitepapers:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=531

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=568

See also:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/ie8.html

http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE8Bugs/

http://css-class.com/test/bugs/ie/ie-bugs.htm

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/03/ie8_beta_1_firs.html
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE8
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/default.htm

http://www.ajaxperformance.com/2008/03/16/testing-ie8s-connection-parallelism/
http://www.tommylogic.com/tutorial-blog/web-design-tutorials/63-get-ready-design-ie8