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IE9 - Help needed quickly! I'm struggling with IE9 beta...can you help? Rate Topic: -----

#1 User is offline   straygoat 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 08:55 AM

Hello all,

I'm hoping you can help me. I am not a developer, but I've got to write a report on IE9 beta aimed at developers....and i'm struggling to get understand it all. The deadline is fast approaching, so i'm hoping some of you can provide the answers i need (in language i can understand!).

I've read a lot of articles about IE9 beta on the web, and the general feeling seems to be that it is a step in the right direction from MS, but there are some significant problems:

1. Getting people to use IE9 instead of IE 6, 7, 8 is going to be tricky as IE9 requires Windows 7....lots of people still on XP. So that means you developers have still got to provide solutions for earlier IEs. I guess that means that IE9 has no real impact on how you work - you've still got to include all the work arounds etc. to support earlier IEs. Right?

2. MS's update policy means that even though IE9 is competitive with today's leading browsers, it won't be updated as quickly or as often as FireFox, Chrome Opera etc. and so won't keep pace with the rest of the browser industry. Would you agree with that?

3. The much heralded HTML 5 support is only for limited HTML 5 commands? I don't know anything about HTML5 to be honest...I gather that it is not supported by the other browsers YET - but they will do soon, and they are likely to support it better than IE9?

4. Could you tell me what some of the more common 'work arounds' were for IE6, 7, and 8? The things that you had to do specifically to get a page to display properly in IE that you didn't have to do in the other browsers? I know that this extra work won't be needed for IE9 as it is supporting web standards much better.

5. Am I right in thinking that the main plus points of IE9 are that it is faster and allows you (as developers) to produce pages that display consistently as on other browsers? (Though you still need to deal with work arounds for older IEs)? Are there any other major plus points for developers?

6. Is there anything in IE9 that is better for developers than in rival browsers?

I'd really appreciate it if anyone can help. I'm really pushed for time on this :(
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#2 User is offline   a.g.r.c 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 12:56 PM

There's a demon among us. He's called Internet Explorer.
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#3 User is offline   straygoat 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 01:06 PM

View Posta.g.r.c, on 08 October 2010 - 12:56 PM, said:

There's a demon among us. He's called Internet Explorer.



Yeah, that's what I heard too. But I need to say why the new Internet Explorer is less of a demon than before/just as evil as before! There are loads of articles online about it, but written by tech-heads for tech-heads, so extremely difficult for me to understand. I get the general gyst of it, but i need to write with a bit of authority on the matter...not easy!
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#4 User is online   zed 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 02:04 PM

don't worry, most of the people who think they are writing with authority know nothing.
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#5 User is offline   NeRo 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 02:43 PM

There maybe a few points in this article that may help answer some of your questions

Internet Explorer 9 Beta: Reviewed and Benchmarked
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#6 User is offline   straygoat 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 03:13 PM

View PostNeRo, on 08 October 2010 - 02:43 PM, said:

There maybe a few points in this article that may help answer some of your questions

Internet Explorer 9 Beta: Reviewed and Benchmarked


Thanks, yes, there are points there about the speed etc. that will prove useful. But in the comments, someone mentions a review of the developer tools included in IE9 - that's kind of what I am looking for: How will IE9 change the way you (i.e. web developers) work? What is better, what is worse?
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#7 User is offline   Wickham 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 03:18 PM

I haven't got IE9 beta yet, but I did get IE8 beta and found I had to use a meta tag to make it process like IE7 as IE8 beta was so bad.

The code which you put in the head section immediately after the <head> tag (not lower in the head section) to make IE8 beta process as IE7 was
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">

so for IE9 to process like IE8 for viewers who haven't got IE9 on Windows 7, edit IE7 to IE8. 
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8">

That doesn't really solve the problem of showing features supported by IE9 because you've told all IE9 browsers to process as IE8!

The other method is to code HTML5 and CSS3 features into your code and leave it so that people with IE9 can view the features, but then have one or more conditional comments for other versions of IE so that those with IE6, 7 or 8 will see a page that looks OK but doesn't show the features processed by IE9.

Conditional comments have only the revised styles and the code must be put after the main stylesheet codes so that it's processed last:-
<!--[if ie 8]>
<style type="text/css">
/*revised styles here*/
</style>
<![endif]-->

<!--[if ie 7]>
<style type="text/css">
/*revised styles here*/
</style>
<![endif]-->


or this for all IE versions less than IE9 (lt IE 9 means less than IE9):-
<!--[if lt ie 9]>
<style type="text/css">
/*revised styles here*/
</style>
<![endif]-->


You would need to avoid new tags like <header>...</header> because previous versions of IE won't process them at all. You would just see default text formatting.

This shows what IE9 beta supports http://msdn.microsof...28VS.85%29.aspx
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#8 User is offline   straygoat 

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Posted 08 October 2010 - 06:25 PM

Thanks Wickham - that's at just the right level for me to understand! So, is this right:

When you are developing a site for general use, you'd create it for IE9 using all the latest features that it supports. These are pretty much the same sort of features that the other browsers already support...IE9 is just MS playing catch up really. Once you've created the site to work well in IE9, you'd have to go back and work in conditions etc. to make sure the site displays ok in IE8, IE7 and IE6 (and that IE9 features are ignored in those browsers). Because the other major browsers are all updated frequently, anything you create for IE9 is likely to display okay in Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc. ?
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#9 User is offline   Georgew 

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Posted 10 November 2010 - 01:45 AM

There are Javascipts available to convert HTML5 into HTML4 to show on older browsers.
HTML5 is supported by all other browsers right now.
I guess you could say something good about IE9 is that it uses your graphics card to help render pages.
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