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Tag: ie

Techy: IE8 incompatible list: What isn’t listed?

February 20, 2009
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Zdnet has just pointed me towards Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View List for Windows Vista which lists all the websites IE 8 is known to have problems with: and it’s extensive (see this Zdnet list for a human-readable display). I did a quick search for most of the major sites and they all seem to be listed: From Microsoft.com (if they can’t get their own site working in their own software it doesn’t bode well), all Amazon sites (.com and .de, .cn and .co.uk etc), all major social networking sites (Facebook.com, MySpace.com, LinkedIn.com and Twitter.com are all listed), to all of Google, bbc.co.uk, Paypal.com , all of eBay and many many more. And this is only the 2,400 major sites that Microsoft have found to have problems with IE8 (or should that be: sites that Microsoft have found that IE8 is broken on).

All the more reason to drop Internet Explorer and try Firefox, Safari, Opera or another browser of your choice (mine’s Firefox)

Techy: Cross Browser Testing

February 17, 2009
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For a while now, I’ve been a great fan of Browser Shots to test websites in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera without having to install all of those web browsers (and previous versions) on my machine. However, it does have a snag: you can only test “static pages”: you can’t interact with the page in anyway (so if you wanted to see if a drop down menu worked well in IE 5.5, you’re out of luck).

However Keyboardface has just blogged about a service I hadn’t heard of before called Cross Browser Testing.com which gives you practically a VNC/remote desktop/LogMeIn style connection to a remote computer (which seem to be Virtual Machine images) which has a selection of browsers installed for you to interactively test on. It’s pretty cheap: there’s a free option, $1 for 5 minutes option (with discounts) or a “pay per month” option. It’ll be worth considering when I’m needing to test the site I’m working on on multi-platform and multi-browser scenerios.

Javascript: innerHTML, Select menu and Internet Explorer

February 12, 2009
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I’ve just had cause to pull in the contents of a SELECT menu using Javascript to help build up a webpage on the fly using the DOM. I had to do it this was a there were potentially 4,000 items for a select html menu (and so the user had to narrow it down by pre-selecting another menu) and then pulling the list of items from the server. The were also some optgroups in there (making using JSON or XML that bit harder) and there could, potentially, be some formatting information. Oh – and there could be 1 or 100 of these menus on the webpage.

The way I initally worked it, and which worked in Firefox, was to use:
document.getElementById(‘menuname’).innerHTML=fetchedHTML;
(menuname being the id of the Domscripting gave me a clue and I eventually finished up with:
document.getElementById(‘menuname’).parentNode.innerHTML = ‘‘;
(i.e. recreating the entire select menu from scratch). It’s not nice, but it works!

Snippet: Yahoo YUI Datatable and Internet Explorer (IE)

October 3, 2008
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I must remember that if I’ve using the Yahoo! (Yahoo User Interface) Datatable and the page validates and works in Firefox, but doesn’t work in Internet Explorer (IE), then the problem is most likely caused by an additional comma at the end of an array.

The YUI logger will not record any actions from that point on and no error will be reported by Microsoft Internet Explorer (at least not IE 6 or IE 7) – it’ll just stop the Javascript from working from the stray comma onwards.

Annoying!