Posted by bodyblueprinter on February 14, 2013 at 4:02am
But I have to! Apparently there is ONE person who cannot read class schedule that are posted on toadalfitness.com in what is claimed to be the most current edition of IE. However, I cannot seem to recreate the issue, leaving me with the crazy question of "how the heck do I fix this". I have never heard a developer speak kindly of IE, but that does not mean I can afford the luxury of "Forget IE". So how does one go about recreating an issue such as this and then fixing it?
Comments
Testing for all versions of
Testing for all versions of ie is very hardware intensive. your client should demonstrate to you using analytics why it is necessary for you to develop for ie. You should also make your client aware of the expense involved and see how committed they are to putting resources into ie.
The only way I know of to maintain sites across all versions of ie is to run multiple dedicated boxes with the various versions installed.
Just saying no to IE is
Just saying no to IE is useless. Half the world uses some flavor of it, and your client wants to reach those people.
There are a couple ways to test with IE. Maybe the easiest, if you have older copies of Windows, is to install VirtualBox (or some other flavor of virtualization software) and run several copies of Windows with the different flavors of IE you need to test.
Microsoft themselves recognize the need to test with different editions of IE. If you have a Windows machine, you can download XP Mode for Windows 7 and run multiple copies, each with a different variant of IE. Here's a how to article I found for it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multiple-versions-...
Also, IE itself has had varying levels of support for previous versions, and this "quirks mode" support is not perfect. So, IE can make new and different mistakes trying to emulate the old and familiar mistakes...
(Lest it sound like I'm picking on only IE, the other browsers have their share of "quirks" too. Firefox on Linux renders jpg colors slightly differently than png colors, for example. Talk about crazy-making!)
--Darryl Richman
http://darryl.crafty-fox.com
IE collection will let you
IE collection will let you install multiple IE versions on the same box, or virtual machine. It works great for me on XP.
http://finalbuilds.com/iecollection.htm
-- Julia v.
http://www.pfvdw.com
Ie Collection
I'd give a caveat that the IE Collection is good for casual testing, but afaik they don't have the exact same behaviour as native browser versions. If you're testing something that really really matters then going the way of VMs as Darryl is more reliable. Of course you still get little differences based on minor versions, OS, etc. For something casual I'd say just support IE 8+. If someone says it's the "most recent" version I'd ask them what OS they're using and/or have them confirm the version number, because there are a few different "most recent" versions.
I remember back when the bundled browsers wouldn't handle conditional comments / form fields etc, they've been hacked or additional libraries have been included since. IE isn't meant to standalone. :)
Blasts from the past:
http://kb.ucla.edu/articles/install-multiple-versions-of-browsers-iesafa...
http://web.archive.org/web/20100117190109/http://mi6.ais.ucla.edu/devbri...
hah
That was posted from China, just noticed the pub date on the article. I kind of wish I kept a proper archive of my old team site, it was simple but at one point I got it down to two divs for layout (one for header, one with a margin for content, sidbar was styled h3s and uls that sat in the margin, no footer). One advantage of a Textpattern (and similarly Expression Engine) style templating over Drupal.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100125055117/http://mi6.ais.ucla.edu/people/
Carl Uebelhart: roaming css/xhtml designer, tech researcher
xhtml. oh my. quite the little standardista I was. ^^;
I second what Carl stated
A good rule of thumb is to support browsers which are still supported by the software company who coded it. MS no longer supports 6 or 7 of IE. they don't even want anyone using those anymore. At last check there was less than 5% of web traffic using those two browsers combined.
Murias
yup
this is two years old: http://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=5089
In some cases losing less than 5% of traffic may not be an option (amazon, etc) but chances are if people are using outdated browsers they're used to weirdness. If you can easily conditional comment something, awesome, but designing for IE first will hurt you down the road... old versions of IE will keep disappearing and new ones will be more standards compliant, so aiming for gecko/webkit works better for IE10 than IE9, IE11 (someday) than IE10, etc whereas a "made for IE site" will just be quirky in the future. Of course it'd be nice if IE dropped their engine for webkit instead of Opera, but you can't get everything in life. ;)
Embrace randomness. You don't know what browser, OS, font smoothing, color calibration, brightness, font resizing, aspect ratio, browser size, etc. If someone has to live without rounded corners so be it.
A couple of IE testing resources
Two recent additions to my testing suite for IE are Sauce and, for those more comfortable with the Terminal, ievms.
Sauce is great for those without much harddrive space, because it just spins up a VM in the cloud and connects you to it via virtual desktop (they have a mac app in the app store).
IEvms lets you download install and run all flavors of IE in Virtualbox virtual machines. The caveat being that you have to download each one as a separate Windows installation onto your local machine.
I prefer both of these over other resources because they both use the latest patched versions of the OS, which is likely what users of older browsers will have.
On testing IE in general
It's been a couple of years since I even thought about supporting IE6 or 7, mainly because Microsoft no longer support it.
But what does "not supporting it" mean? My rule of thumb is that the content of the page is still accessible. The visitor viewing the site via IE6/7 has to be able to consume the content of the page. I use the generic term "consume" because that includes those using assistive technology.
That doesn't assume they get any CSS or styling, whatsoever. IMHO, I think it is OK to not serve styles or progressive enhancement to IE6/7. But you should absolutely support IE8/9 and be testing on IE10. These are modern(-ish) browsers. Even if a lot of us develop on Apple products and use FF or Chrome, we cannot ignore the 40%+ users who use Windows and press the blue E to browse the web.
Nice.
Sauce looks really interesting, it's appealing to me to be able to "do it right" without having to juggle local VMs.
re: IE6/7 I'm with you to a certain extent. I like CSS (pseudo)selectors so 6/7 appear somewhat broken at times (but overall useable). Whether you go the "kinda broken but useable" depends on a mix of things, but if you're on a proper web app vs an informational website that might not be worth it. There's a big difference between gmail and google news having to make sure people can consume content on it using IE6.
The simplest ways around this are as you said dropping all styles, or being a bit obnoxious and having chrome frame kick in / point them to it if they don't have it installed. :)