I'm at my wits end right now trying to get a website working in IE7-9, the issue I'm having is getting text-shadow to appear in a decent matter. I've been using the 960 grid system so changes are very minimum, I've been checking changes with IE Netrender. However lately IE Netrender has been having issues so I can't test the layout in a timely fashion.
I did have VM Ware set up but I'm really tired of reactivating my Windows copy and installing a separate image for each version of the browser. I don't have Windows 7 for IE9 as well. I'm looking for a free option. I've tried searching but everything seems outdated.
So my question is, how does everyone test their site for IE7-9?
The IE Developer Tools let you set IE7 and IE8 modes on IE9, so you can get 98% testing with one version.
There are some issues that don't crop up there though, so its a good idea to do a quick real browser check at the end.
MS has free VMs you can download with the different versions of IE on them. I'm not sure if you can run them on a Mac though.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575
By having a Windows license. Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but there's no such thing as a free meal. The only truly guaranteed method of testing a site in Internet Explorer is to actually use it in Internet Explorer, be it in a virtual machine or on a real PC. Spoon used to have an Internet Explorer virtualization web app, but that has since been removed at Microsoft's behest.
Related
Lately I have been having trouble with debugging using Chrome dev tools. Once I open dev tools and start using the javascript debugger or the HTML inspector, every action will take at least a few seconds. Another developer with the exact same machine does not experience similar problems. I have tried reinstalling chrome and installing Chrome Canary, but the problem still remains the same. It did not use to be like this, and it is driving me mad, so that is why I am reaching out to the stack overflow community. Does anyone know any common reasons why dev tools would be performing so badly on a decent computer? Are there any settings I can try disabling, etc?
I am running Windows 10, and the client-side technology stack I am working with is based on React and Webpack with hot reload.
I just installed Firefox on a new computer running Windows 8.1.
I usually use Chrome but recently I've been redesigning my website and today I tried loading it on multiple browsers to see if there were any problems.
It's a Flash games site with lots of flash ads. So when I went to my site in the new Firefox browser, I was surprised to see a lot of "plugin needed" boxes.
I tried loads of sites, and it became apparent that flash was not installed in the firefox browser at all. No Flash was loading.
Bizarrely, the grey box telling me I needed a plugin didn't give me any hint as to what plugin I needed, provided no link, and even blocked the fail-safe link to adobe that is displayed if flashplayer is not installed when using swfobject.js.
I tried searching for the flash player update in the firefox add-ons - nothing.
I tried searching on google and downloaded the general flash player update (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) - installed it and nothing changed.
Eventually after 20 minutes of searching, I found this obscure page on Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html
I downloaded and ran the exe for 'Plugin-based browsers' and this worked.
It appears the latest version of Firefox has deliberately not included Flash Player, which is utterly mad if that's really true.
However, I can't find any discussion or documentation that this is the case. But then why wasn't it included in my version?
Does anybody know anything about this?
Firefox has never included Flash, you always need to go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer and download the Flash Plugin on your first install of Firefox. Make sure that you turn on autoupdate for Flash by using the Flash cpanel app in your Windows Control Panel. Then check regularly to make sure Flash is still autoupdating. It can have a bad habit of failing.
It's only recently that Microsoft includes Flash and only on IE on Windows 8+ as a copy of Google's attempt to increase Flash security by including it in Chrome some time back. IE gets its Flash updates through Windows Update when Microsoft gets the patches applied.
Google is the 800lb gorilla that gets what it wants and twisted Adobe's arm to force them to supply Flash code so they can do their own updates via their Pepper Flash module which updates when Chrome autoupdates.
While Mozilla will warn you that Flash is out of date, they do not have the monetary clout like huge corporations (Microsoft, Google) to force Adobe to give them source code so they can fix Adobe's security sieve as it happens.
Mozilla has chosen to promote HTML5 and open DRM to hurry the eventual demise of a piece of Macromedia Legacy web extensions that has been plaguing us with serious zero day exploits (Jan-Feb 2015 most recent) that often appear back-to-back and often get 2 try patch releases in the hope that it gets fixed.
And in that same timeframe, often Chrome and Windows 8 versions of IE have a similar lag to bug fix, though a lot quicker than Adobe.
Get in the habit manually checking Chrome's version, Chrome can suffer update failure despite its automatic update feature.
Background Info
I'm currently searching around for ways to add support for older versions of Internet Explorer for an existing project that uses Protovis (and therefore the tag). My searching around has led me to two main places:
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/protovis-internet-explorer/
Touches on the Chrome Frame plugin as well as SVGweb
https://gitorious.org/protovis/jloves-protovis
Seems to be an integration of Protovis with SVGweb
So far, I've downloaded the examples from each of these and opened them up in IE8 and have had no success whatsoever. The exact version of the IE is 8.0.7600.16385 and is running on a 64 bit Windows 7 Machine, and for the sake of SVGweb, the Flash version installed is 10.2.152.
The question(s)
Since I've had no luck making any of these work, I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong. Can anyone verify that the examples found in http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/media/upload/tutorials/protovis/protovis-ie.zip and/or https://gitorious.org/~jlove/protovis/jloves-protovis/commits/master work in IE8? If not, is there any other way (preferrably server side, but if there is a plugin that users can download and install for IE8 that would be okay too) to make protovis work on older IE versions?
Thank you for any help or advice!
I never had any luck with either of those solutions either. However, datamarket.com have recently come up with a drop-in shim available from http://blog.datamarket.com/2011/06/22/protovis-support-internet-explorer-8/ which worked right out of the box for me. The only drawback is that interactive aspects of your visualisation may not work in IE using the shim - I had some drag-select functionality that I had to re-implement with sliders under IE.
I develop web applications on a Mac, so I can test the standard Mac browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc). But I'm wondering what is the accepted way for testing Windows browsers and especially IE? How does one test different versions of IE?
Some possible solutions I can think of:
Dual boot - This seems like a pain if you are developing code in a Mac environment, but want to test in Windows.
Windows virtual machine - This has always sent my laptop fan haywire and caused general slowness
Buy a Windows laptop - This certainly works, but is a cost I'm not in the mood to pay for just a test machine.
Something else I'm missing?
I'm not looking for an absolute right or wrong answer here, I'm just curious what other developers do, and if there's any accepted practice.
Another option, if you can run Virtual PC or have a virtualization application that can use VPC virtual hard drives, is to download the IE Application Compatibility vhds from Microsoft.
Adobe BrowserLab
Easiest way is virtual machines that contain their separate versions of IE since you can not easily have multiple versions of IE running with the update to IE8.
If you want to do automated stuff, you always can use Selenium Web Driver
virtual box looks like a good option... except you need to get a hold of a windows os.
apparently there is also something called winebottler... check out this other post from stack overflow for more details.
Is there a IE tester for mac?
IE tester is a not a bad option, allowing you to switch between different versions of IE at the click-of-a-mouse. It's not perfect, there are a few things it wont mimic exactly, but if you're on a budget it's great (and free). But of course you will need access to a windows box. Beg/borrow/steal one? To be honest, if you're doing a lot of web dev, you should have access to a machine for testing.
The alternative is to use an online rendering service, but that will cost you.
I am developing a simple webpage in Windows Server 2003. I am testing the webpage with multiple versions of Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
The problem is that only Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 are displaying my webpages correctly. This started occurring since I used the recent version of jQuery.
When I try to test using Internet Explorer 6, Ajax controls do not work properly. The same page works in Windows XP on Internet Explorer 6 on a different machine.
I need to fix the bug I am having in Internet Explorer.
Is there a bugfix so that I can test on Windows Server 2003?
Is there some other method to test Internet Explorer 6 effectively in Windows Server 2003?
Why would Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Server 2003 behave differently than Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP?
How can I make them act the same?
I've found when working with the Multiple IEs that they don't provide a perfect way of testing IE6. I'd recommend downloading Virtual PC 2007 and the IE6 image and seeing if your ajax controls work in that environment. You can download the IE6 virtual hard disk from
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en
The answer to your last two bullet points is that IE6 is a crufty (buggy, insecure) old piece of software that does not implement the relevant W3C and ECMA standards properly. IE7 is a bit better, and IE8 is better still, but the open source alternatives are superior in the area of standards compliance.
While there are a lot of people still using IE6, the proportion is falling steadily. For example, the latest available Net Applications statistics show that IE6 is down to less than 17% and Firefox 3.0 is over 20%.
So what should this mean to you? Well the aim of standards and standards compliance is that a web page that uses the standard in the right way should work, and look pretty much the same, on any standards compliant browser. If you try to support a blatantly non-compliant browser you are going to have to incorporate all sorts of workarounds (alternative versions of pages, clever CSS hacks, conditional Javascript, etc) to get your pages to work across the range of browsers. It is hard work.
So my advice is to not support IE6 and earlier unless you really have to. Instead, spend your time making sure that your web page works on Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. My experience is that pages that work on one of the open source alternatives have a good chance of working on all of them.