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Making Your Website Work with Internet Explorer 8

22 September 2009

34SP.com Staff

Many 34SP.com website hosting clients have had their websites hosted for a period of years. Whether you are on a Professional Hosting plan, a Reseller Hosting account, or even have a Dedicated Server – you still need to pay attention to changes on the Internet to keep your websites current.

One such change occurred recently when Microsoft released a new version of its Internet Explorer web browser about 6 months ago. You may not know, but although Internet Explorer has been steadily losing market share in the browser market, it still counts for nearly 67 percent of all browsers. Now that I.E. version 8.0 has been released, web developers may have to do some work with their websites to ensure their site displays correctly on the new browser.

With Internet Explorer 8.0, Microsoft has enhanced how it renders and displays websites. Commonly, the complaint toward Internet Explorer was its failure to comply with Internet standards for CSS and HTML.

The I.E. 8.0 browser is said to have massively improved this, bringing Internet Explorer in line with other major web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browser.

With the new I.E. 8.0 release it is possible that there may be issues with it correctly reading your legacy html code. So what should you do if this is the case for your website?

If your site was fine with Internet Explorer 7 but not I.E. 8, then there is an easy fix that can be entered into your HTML.

Somewhere between the <head> tags of every page on your website, insert the following XHTML:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

This tells Internet Explorer 8 to build your website exactly as it did in Internet Explorer 7.

Problem solved.

For more information on this issue please view the following: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956197. Of course you can also contact us here in the Customer Service and Technical Support Departments for any questions at all on your websites as well. We’re always ready to help.