Category: Internet Explorer 8

MAP 5.5 (beta) gives you total control over IE migration

This week has been really intensive with a 5 day course on depoying Windows 7, including the MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit). As always there were a lot of interesting discussions related to Internet Explorer, which many times casues problems when migrating to a later operating system. One of the major problems with IE migrations are that we have little control and historically had problems assessing the current IE, web apps or web browser status. The answer came a couple of nights ago, in the latest beta MAP.

MAP 5.5 beta brings the possibility to inventory for which IE and third party browsers that are used in your organization, which default browsers are set but you will also see all activex controls and browser helper objects are being used, including a count number ith how many times for instance a particular activex control has been used. This is some really great information that will for sure help us in the migrating process when deploying Windows 7.

Get your hands on the beta from Microsoft Connect.

Webcast on migrating from IE6 to IE8

Join Chris Jackson in the webcast Migrating from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 (Level 300) to learn what you need to know when you migrate from IE6 to IE8. Actually I met Chris at the MVP Summit that took place last week and he is indeed a great and inspiring speaker and an interesting person to talk to. What Chris doesn’t know about application (and web site) compatibility is not worth knowing :)

Fool a web site into thinking you are another browser or OS

Some time ago I wanted to see a soccer game via Canal Digitals web service but as I am running Windows 7 on my Media Center connected to my TV the web service discovered this and did not let me play this using Windows Media Player and instead offered me to view it in Flash format. Viewing the game in Flash format really wasn’t the best in quality and as I and my co-watchers discovered the game was more or less unwatchable.

In halftime I had the time to do the necessary corrections to fool the web service into presenting itself as another operating system and Internet Explorer version. This made the Windows Media stream instantly and not to mention with much better quality. This is done easilty by changing the so called user agent string which is a string which presents certain information such as OS, web browser and version and some more info.

If you want to change the user agent string and fool a web site or service into thinking it is something it is not you can do this using one of the registry fixes found at http://www.enhanceie.com/ua.aspx.

Control compatibility settings in IE8 using GPOs

As Internet Explorer 8 render web pages in a new way than previous versions of Internet Explorer there is a good chance that one or more web pages you or your users regularly visit are broken or not displaying properly in IE8. Fortunately there is a compatibility mode in IE8 that makes web pages render as though they were displayed in IE7. This action is normally a manual one and the main problem here is that very few users are aware of this compatibility mode. To alleviate problems for the end users you can control the settings and compatibility list of web sites using group policy objects.

Start the Group Policy manager and go to Computer configuration > Administrative templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Compatibility view and there look for “Use Policy List of Internet Explorer 7 sites”. Add the URLs for the web sites that you want IE 8 to always render in IE7 mode.

“Fix” the compatibility problems with IE8 beta

Some time during the third quarter this year the next beta of Internet Explorer 8 will be released. Microsoft is already asking people, webmasters specifically, to update their web sites to be Internet Explorer 8 compatible. IE8 follow web standards in a new way and this causes quite a few web sites to look not so good in Internet Explorer 8 native mode.

Of course the best option is to make your web site follow the standards but in any cases where this is not possible, due to lack of time, money or knowledge there is a snippet of code that you can add to your web sites to make Internet Explorer 8 render them as if they were interpreted in Internet Explorer 7.

The below snippet of code must be placed directly after the <head> tag.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">

Adding this tag is equal to running Internet Explorer 8 in the “Emulate IE7” mode.

More information: Your Web site may not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1