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

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

About additional connections allowed in IE8

http://blog.httpwatch.com/2008/03/31/blocked-time-and-ie-8/

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections/

Since we will soon be using the AJAX Control Toolkit for some portions of our systems:

http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/

Have you started testing eith IE8?  Have you found any unexpected/problematic differences?
Email Me