I love me some IE 8. Not.
We’re currently working on a new website for the Clayton Downtown Development Committee. We’re pretty excited about it and want to provide something new, exciting and with some snap. And yes, there are a number of things that can be done to provide that. However, when you run into snags like CSS support in mainstream browsers – IE 8 comes to mind – it makes life a lot less fun on THIS end.
On the computer repair side, we’ve gotten a number of calls from customers with nothing but problems with the IE 9 browser breaking all sorts of things, not handling websites well, causing computer slowdowns, etc, ad nauseum. So we have discouraged people from updating to it until a patch or two have come out. And THAT is where the CSS compatibility has finally been added. I’m expecting this site to look great in IE 9. But we’ll find out shortly. Downloading it now to test.
Sadly Microsoft will never release an Internet Explorer 9 version for anything prior to Windows Vista – and thinking about it realistically, XP *IS* 8 or 9 years old at this point. I guess I can live with that. If you’re using an 8+ year old operating system, you shouldn’t really be expecting to get cutting edge features… Though somehow, Firefox/Mozilla has managed to do it. Huh.
So as a web developer, do we spend hours and hours making something shoehorn into IE 8? We have something that will display well on Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari and degrades reasonably in IE 8 (and we’re going to find out HOW WELL it displays on IE 9 shortly – reboot required). I think the short answer is “no”. If we’d set out to do images for nice rounded corners and do things the long hard-coded way with lots of hand-coding, it would be fine. But when we have all those great things that all the other browsers support natively, but through CSS, I think we’ll feast with new browser CSS goodies, and let ’em eat 8.
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