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.
Related
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 I've tried searching but everything seems outdated.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.
I recently started using the Dojo firebug extension. I had gotten used to it since it had some nice features (letting you see dojo on the widget level). This was good for me because I am in the process of trying to learn dojo so this really let me see how stuff worked together.
My question is, has anyone found any solutions to get the Dojo firebug extension working in Firefox 6 or should I just try downgrading to FF5?
Thanks
UPDATE:
I tried a workaround I found somewhere else. It said to use the Firefox nightly build add-on, and that add-on would allow me to override the version compatibility. I tried that and it still didn't work.
I recommend trying the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension from Mozilla. This extension (besides letting you report incompatible add-ons) lets you completely disable version checking.
It's a great way to ensure that older extensions still work when Firefox upgrades the browser every week. Now, this assumes that the issue is with version compatibility, and not that the plugin is actually broken! If it's the latter, there's not much else you can do.
(Also, that's an awesome plugin. I'm definitely going to try it out myself here shortly!)
I've recently started using watir-webdriver and so far am a big fan. However I need to be able to test Safari too, and I don't have access to a mac to be able to use Safari-Watir.
Does anyone know a good alternative to use for testing Safari on a windows machine? (In Ruby of course)
Thanks
(important, see UPDATE below)
the Selenium Webdriver folks are apparently waiting for something from Apple in order to support safari. I would not hold your breath.
Apple does have a version of Safari for the PC, I'm not sure how good the current version is, the initial releases were.. um, well, lets just say they had issues (lots of issues)
Personally (mostly for security reasons) I would not run it nor recommend anyone use it for any purpose other than downloading Chrome or Firefox. But unfortunately a lot of apple users use it because it's what came with their systems, which means to the extent apple users are part of your target market, you have to test on it.
For the moment that means you'll need to use Safariwatir, which has not as far as I can tell had an update for a year or more.
the current state of support on both the Selenium/Webdriver side and the Safariwatir side was discussed recently in this thread in the watir general group on google
UPDATE
Webdriver now has Safari support, which makes direct support of safari (I think on a mac only at this point) possible. See http://watirmelon.com/2012/04/17/using-watir-webdriver-with-safari-at-last/ for more info.. still a bit DYI but I'm sure it will get more accessable soon.
Mike, seems this is available now. Alister Scott wrote up some instructions on his blog Using Watir-Webdriver with Safari At Last
Unfortunately this still a bit DYI because you have to build your own safari extension, which requires getting certificates and such from apple, and I'm not sure if you can create the right environment to build that stuff on anything other than a mac.
im a bit new at extension development, but im about to embark upon a project to build a ffox extension.
Does anyone know if its possbile, with minimal adaption, to make a firefox extension compatible with ie8 as a plugin and if so, are there any caveats i should be aware of?
I guess its just javascript code wrapped around the ffox or ie8 wrapper, but would really appreciate to learn from someone who has experience.
Cheers
Ke
Others may know better than I but I don't think there's any "minimal adaptation" (<- I'm assuming you meant to say "adaptation") way to do this. IE plugins are COM and FF plugins are coded with JavaScript and XUL.
I've just downloaded IE8, which replaced my IE7, but that's okay because IE8 has a 'compatibility view' which is meant to render pages like IE7 (not sure about the JavaScript).
I was wondering if there is a listing on the internet of all major differences a developer should know between the versions. I've searched Google a bit but haven't found a satisfactory listing.
So, what should I (or any other web developer) know about getting my site working optimally on IE8, and what are the major differences between the two?
I would start by looking here:
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
Differences between IE8 Compatibility View and IE7
IE8 Developer Resources
I don't think you'll find a comprehensive "gotcha" list of rendering quirks until more folks have it installed. There are a bunch of new features like Accelerators that you can develop to build new features into IE8. This looks like a good start.