A Date With IE8
March 7, 2008
So I spent days and hours slaving over a new site and making sure that it worked in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari et al and heard the news that the IE8 beta was available for download. I rushed on over to the Microsoft site with a mixture of excitement (lord knows why? I think I need to get out more) and some amount of dread to download the latest incarnation of the much maligned browser only to find that when I tested my lovingly crafted site on it… well.. let’s just say some colourful expletives were issued forth. The site looked terrible… busting out everywhere, and the funny thing is I knew it was going to happen, but kinda hoped it wouldn’t… you know, just for a change.
Realising countless others would be having the same trouble on this day of days I turned to the all knowing Google for advice, and some simple clicks later I had myself a piece of code which promised to solve my problem. And thankfully for my sanity it did. Simply inserting the following <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7;FF=2;OtherUA=4″ /> into the head of every page made my woes disappear and had my site looking how I intended it to look. Phew, thank you Google and panic over…
Well, not quite as I then went into a frenzy of checking all my other sites to make sure they weren’t also similarly ‘IE8′d’, you heard that expression here first folks… although luckily for me they were all fine, bizarre. So my first experience with IE8 went rather disappointingly exactly how I imagined it would, after which I simply closed it down knowing it will only be used in the future to check my future projects compatibility with it. Sorry Microsoft you lost me to Mozilla Firefox a long time ago, and from what I saw yesterday that’s not going to be changing anytime soon.
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