IE8 is not always really IE8…

I am involved in the development of a new intranet for one of our customers. We deciced to develop for IE8, Firefox, Chrome, but not for IE8-.

Granted, we also did it to make our lives a bit easier, but most of the users are no longer using IE7 and we feel we should promote modern (and/thus safer) browsers. The application itself will also give a nice warning if users are using IE8-…

Well, everything was fine until one user said the website looked slightly different on his pc. Not too many worries, we would check it out… But then he mentioned the uploading of attachments wasn’t working. Now, that alarmed us, because that’s key functionality.

The difference was that he was running IE8 on Windows XP and other users are using Windows Vista en Windows 7. Apparently, Microsoft has deployed TWO version of IE8 that are being used right now. OK, the version number is eight, but versions below 8.0.7600 differ quite a bit from 8.0.xxxx that are lower. For example:

- css styling is not according to standards
- ‘fakepath’ security feature for upload control is not implemented
- <!–[if lt IE 8]> does not work
- … (?)

Seems that Microsoft is not pushing its most recent version of IE8 to all platforms, so we’re off for a round of tuning and tweeking… Thank you Microsoft…

Too bad, I really liked IE8 (the ‘real’ one), Javascript and CSS handling is actually quite close to the standards… Let’s hope IE9 starts off OK.

And maybe someday IE rendering will be as fast as other browsers?