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Preparing for IE8
Question
The new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) release candidate has come out, and the full IE8 release is expected later in 2009. Will this break my site? What do I need to do to prepare for it?
Answer
The vast majority if web users still use IE, and so the release of a new version is a major consideration because over the next year or two, the majority of your site visitors will gradually be adopting it.
In theory, since CactuShop's front end XHTML is coded to be 'standards compliant', IE8 should handle it without issue. Although we noticed bugs in the way the IE8 betas handled CactuShop, the release candidate (RC) seems to have fixed these. Some brief testing of both the front and back end of CactuShop suggest that it should work and display 100% correctly in IE8.
However, one must also consider that virtually all stores are customized with their own HTML skin design. If you adhered closely to W3C specs, then it is fairly safe to say that it should work ok in IE8. But we would always advise that you test when a new major browser comes out, just to be sure.
We found that the dropdown navigation menu on this site for example did not work in IE8 because it used conditional statements framed for IE6 and IE7, and had none for IE8, hence it degraded to a standard set of links.
Fortunately, Microsoft is aware of the potential for issues like this. So they have built in a way for site designers to specify that IE8 should render the pages as IE7 did. This is a relatively simple and easy way to fix any IE8 specific issues with your site. To do it, just insert this new tag into your skin just after the HEAD tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
Once this is in place, users of IE8 will not have to take any specific action like switching to IE7 mode - instead the browser will do it for them for any page with this tag.