December 21st, 2008
Which sites will make the IE8 Compatibility Hall of Shame?
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Here’s a short, selective list of sites that fail to render properly when viewed in the upcoming release candidate of IE8:
Techmeme – Highlighting the link in a featured story caused part of the headline text to disappear. See the white block in this screen shot? With Compatibility View enabled, you can see the rest of the headline there.
Dell Support – Scrolling lists wouldn’t scroll properly and some graphics were laid out in the wrong place.
The New York Times - Graphics were positioned improperly, overlapping text beneath them, and a multimedia control also spilled out of its assigned column to cover text in an adjoining column.
Emusic.com – I saw some serious display glitches, including graphics that covered up text and some drop-down list controls that pushed the rest of the page out of position when clicked.
Newsgator Online and Acronis.com – Both of these sites suffered minor display glitches. Sites from smaller companies like these, which have traffic far below that of the big sites, might not hit the radar of Microsoft for months, if at all.
But the most severe compatibility problems I saw were from two sites that you’d expect would do a better job of enforcing compatibility.
Google Analytics – The Dashboard page displays web site traffic data using a Flash control. On two systems running recent builds of IE8, those reports were blackened and unreadable until I clicked the Compatibility View button. (On one system, in fact, the compatibility problem was so severe that it caused the browser to crash and recover repeatedly until it gave up and automatically applied compatibility settings to the page.)
And finally…
Slashdot – Individual stories on the premier “News for Nerds” site were practically unreadable under IE8 until I clicked the Compatibility View button. Graphics shifted and disappeared, huge white spaces separated the story from the comments below it on the page, and the banner ads on some pages failed to display even with Compatibility View enabled. (The same page displayed correctly in Firefox 3.)
If you’re responsible for a web site, big or small, you might want to take a careful look at it after the IE8 Release Candidate comes out. As I discovered, the fix is relatively easy to apply, and Microsoft also has detailed information and a wizard that can help with ensuring compatibility for larger sites. Full instructions are available at the Internet Explorer Compatibility Center.
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Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/27/08
