Link tags: ie8

How to Kill IE11 - What the Deaths of IE6 and IE8 Tell Us About Killing IE | Mike Sherov

An interesting look at the mortality causes for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8, and what they can tell us for the hoped-for death of Internet Explorer 11.

I disagree with the conclusion (that we should actively block IE11—barring any good security reasons, I don’t think that’s defensible), but I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t be shipping polyfills in production just for IE11. Give it your HTML. Give it your CSS. Withhold modern JavaScript. If you’re building with progressive enhancement (and you are, right?), then giving IE11 users a sub-par experience is absolutely fine …it’s certainly better than blocking them completely.

I Used The Web For A Day On Internet Explorer 8 — Smashing Magazine

A fascinating look at the web today with IE8. And it’s worth remembering who might be experiencing the web like this:

Whoever they are, you can bet they’re not using an old browser just to annoy you. Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.

The article also outlines two possible coping strategies:

1. Polyfilling Strive for feature parity for all by filling in the missing browser functionality.
2. Progressive Enhancement Start from a core experience, then use feature detection to layer on functionality.

Take a wild guess as to which strategy I support.

There’s a bigger point made at the end of all this:

IE8 is today’s scapegoat. Tomorrow it’ll be IE9, next year it’ll be Safari, a year later it might be Chrome. You can swap IE8 out for ‘old browser of choice’. The point is, there will always be some divide between what browsers developers build for, and what browsers people are using. We should stop scoffing at that and start investing in robust, inclusive engineering solutions. The side effects of these strategies tend to pay dividends in terms of accessibility, performance and network resilience, so there’s a bigger picture at play here.

The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 by Troy Hunt

A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:

2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.

Persuading Microsoft to Implement Canvas « Processing.js Blog

The 26 step process required to add +1 to a feature request in IE. Franz Kafka is alive and well and living in Redmond.

isolani - Web Standards: IE8 Blacklist: forcing standards rendering opt-in

Bend over 'cause Microsoft is about to stick it to us standards-savvy developers. Again.

Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise | The Register

Håkon is not happy with the default settings in IE8. Deep in the preferences, "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" is checked.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets” [dive into mark]

Mark Pilgrim fisks Joel Spolsky. He's not greedy either: there's still plenty of straw men left in Spolsky's screed for the rest of us to skewer.

IEBlog : Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Praise Jeebus! The IE team are doing the right thing regarding the default behaviour of version targeting in IE8. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

A reasoned response to X-UA-Compatible • Gated Logic • nevali.net

A nice analysis and skewering of Microsoft's proposed default behaviour for version targeting.

The B-List: X-No-Thanks

A superbly clear analysis of the proposed default version targeting behaviour in IE8+.

Microsoft koan [dive into mark]

The madness of the default behaviour in IE8 explained in a beautiful koan.

Katemonkey.co.uk: X-UA-Lemur-Compatible

The timeline behind Microsoft's latest announcement.... as told by stuffed lemurs.

this is rachelandrew.co.uk » IE8 and the future of the web

Rachel adds her thoughts on Microsoft's broken implementation of version switching—and very good thoughts they are too.

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Great news from Redmond: IE8 passes the Acid2 test.