Byrne Tony Byrne

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IE8 and your CMS

19-Mar-2009

Tags: Web Content Management, Implementation, Industry Standards

Microsoft's browser went out for general release today. Like you, we'll be scrambling to see how our site behaves under this production version of IE8.

Where things get trickier -- and enterprises often think to address only much later -- is how your internal web applications work under IE8, especially your Web CMS tool.

IE8 should ultimately become a good thing for most CMS users. It's more standards-compliant and has faster AJAX support. But what if your CMS package uses messy code, or employs specific work-arounds for IE6 or IE7 treatment of AJAX widgets? Then, it might break under IE8. This happened frequently with IE7.

Now, your IT people may be saying, "no worries: we're sticking with IE6/7 as our enterprise standard." Well, people do work from home, and home users often upgrade more readily, not the least because of the promised performance and security enhancements.

IE8 also brings some proprietary extensions (e.g., "Web Slices" and "Accelerators") that could prove alluring to software developers, but I'll urge them to lay off. We're finally starting to see cross-browser compatibility in most Web CMS interfaces. One-off widgets take us a step backwards.

Fortunately, IE8 will respect a metatag that makes it emulate IE7. (<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />) I suspect many webmasters will be putting this on their public sites and intranets until they can test more thoroughly. You might want to start thinking about how to get that tag into your employee-facing CMS (and other) applications as well.

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