What browsers does your app support?

To focus on supporting modern browsers, we are deprecating official compatibility of Google Analytics with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) at the end of 2013.

Above is a snippet from the latest blog post on the Google Analytics blog. The Analytics team have made the bold(ish) step of announcing the end of the line for IE 8 support in the next 3 months. It doesn't seem all that long ago when they announced they were dropping support IE 7 (and Firefox 3.5/Safari 3); but that was back in June 2011! Don't forget that they dropped proper support for IE 8 in a range of Google Apps like Gmail and Calendar last year, those users get basic HTML offerings with many features removed or read-only type views of the apps.

I'd love to see the analytics browser usage data for Google Analytics to see how many of their customer's are going to be affected!

I'm going to use this news as motivation to drop our legacy IE support (we still support even older browsers than IE 8 :/) - I'll let you know how it goes.

Internet Explorer is killing the internet (and me)

As any professional web developer knows, cross-browser testing is one of those day to day mundane tasks that's required for most web UI work. You've spent time creating beautiful UI mock ups with that creative mind of yours, transferred that to HTML and it looks good. Chrome and Firefox is pixel perfect. Then it's that moment you've been putting off - what does it look like in IE? Boom. You're spending the rest of the day, turning that beautiful HTML and CSS into a shambolic hack before it finally resembles what you intended it to.

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

OVER 10 YEARS AGO!

...when we laughed our socks off to Monsters inc and Apple introduced us to the iPod; Microsoft gave birth to Internet Explorer 6. It's still to this day stifling the creativity and wasting the time of web developers across the globe. If you find yourself in the unlucky position where a decent percentage of your target audience is still living in the past on IE 6 (or 7 or 8) you're hands are often tied. It requires a bold business decision to say no to IE6 support. Some people, projects and companies are doing this - in some interesting ways too (IE7 tax). Even Microsoft are fed up and have created their own IE6 count down site to encourage people to upgrade. But this act of redemption is too little too late. Saying that, the site is fairly interesting. It displays the stats of IE6 usage around the world. Surprisingly, China being the worst offenders still. Here's an article I found that outlines the reasons why China still favours IE6.

Rant over.

Internet Explorer 5.5 / 6 PNG Issues

Most web developers are aware of the IE alpha transparency problems with PNG images; or will be before long. A lot of developers use GIF images rather than the superior PNG format for this reason; which is a shame.

I was discussing the issue with Alex over at Prettier Pixels (a talented UK freelance website designer and builder) and he suggested this nifty IE PNG fix by TwinHelix that you can use to avoid the issues. Thanks Alex!

I long for the day when IE 6 support is no longer required!

jQuery .html() Problems in Internet Explorer

So I've developed my web application in firefox, all seems to be working fine but before I check-in I quickly check the application in the other major browsers; they all work great. All work great APART from IE!

In IE it turns out that the jQuery .html() attribute won't replace contents of first matched element unless the new HTML is valid (i.e. opening and closing tags match). Guess I can't complain with IE not liking the HTML I'm giving it when its imperfect. If only IE practiced what it preached! :)

// This fails in IE...
$('#someDivID').html("<div id='newDivID'><p>hello world</p></div></div>");

// This works in IE...
$('#someDivID').html("
hello world
");

That is all.

IE AJAX Caching Issue

I don't want to pick on IE again (it has been less than 24 hours since my last post about IE), but I'm afraid I have to. I've been working on a new project recently that makes use of AJAX. I usually develop in Firefox and then fix all my IE problems afterwards. This time however one of my AJAX areas of the site seemed to rarely update in IE (if at all), other browsers were fine.

After some playing around I came to the conclusion that IE was caching my AJAX requests. You could argue that IE is right to cache the requests, as the HTTP spec states that GET requests should be cached. But given the browser knows a XMLHttpRequest is being made the caching is completely uneccessary/unwanted. Once I knew the problem the fix was easy. I just needed to append something random to the request URI, a number or timestamp for example.

So instead of requests to /Resource, just use /Resource?ie={random}. It's fairly straight forward to generate a random number in Javascript:

// Random number between 0 and 100
Math.floor(Math.random()*101);

Realising that I wouldn't be alone in tackling the issue I found people used similar tactics to get around the problem. Another neat way is to change the request to be a POST.

IE6? Time to Upgrade Says Microsoft

IE6 we haven't been friends for a while now. We haven't been able to sit at the same desk for some time, around seven years without an argument starting.

Needless to say I am not in the least bit sad to hear you are finally being ousted by your makers; Microsoft are trying to get the heavily used browser's users to upgrade. Although web savvy users have updated their browser, Microsoft is targeting the tough cookies and touting its own IE 8 as a better alternative.

It's about time :)

• CNET news article on IE6 upgrade
• Wanna help? Add this IE6 update to your site