Prepare for Internet Explorer 8.0 Today! Yes, Today.
For twelve years, I was an architect of enterprise, commercial software. One of the most important lessons that I learned is that the software that you write today will be in use much longer than you imagine... MUCH LONGER! If you take a shortcut in your work, it will cost you much more to fix it later. I often sat in meetings and heard the counter-argument "But we can fix it in the next Service Pack." Unfortunately, it costs customers real money to upgrade patches and service packs even if they are free. In some regulated industries, the customer much perform a complete re-evaluation of the system after installing a patch.
My advice: if you know that there is a problem heading your way, do what you can today to help prevent a crisis tomorrow.
Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2 will be available to the public in August. Some web sites may experience problems due to changes that were made to improve standards compliance. Symptoms may include changes in the size or position of objects and possible JavaScript errors.
The good news is that Microsoft has provided an excellent new feature in Internet Explorer that allows you to explicitly state what version of Internet Explorer you designed your web application to support. This means that there is something very simple that you can do today to help prevent problems tomorrow, next year and ten years from now!
At minimum, add the following meta tag to the head of your pages. This tag will tell Internet Explorer that your pages were designed for IE7.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
When future versions of Internet Explorer see this tag, they will know that they should render the page exactly as it was render in IE7.
"But wait, " you say, "I work on an internal application so I don't need to worry about Service Packs. I can go in and make changes anytime I want. It will be a year or more before it's IE8 is a standard at my company. " As a consultant, I work with many companies. Even with corporate standards, there are always users that are running new or different software. (Perhaps they are using VPN from home or they received a new portable that came preloaded with non-standard software.) Ultimately, internal customers will still blame you if your application does not work as expected.
What can you do today to prevent a crisis tomorrow?
- Add the single meta tag listed above to your pages today. If you do nothing else, that will help ensure that your pages do not suddenly break.
- If you wrote code that attempts to detect the browser version, ensure that you did not hard code it to look for exactly "7". (Every time a new browser is released, developers make the same mistake.) Microsoft provides future-safe code at https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/DevelopersExisting.htm.
- Install Internet Explorer 8.0 on a test machine and ensure that your applications are working correctly.
- Read about what's new or different about 8.0 at https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/.
Do it today! Yes, today.