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I’ve recently started testing websites I develop for clients in the new beta version of Internet Explorer 8. Whilst this version of the browser hasn’t been released to the public yet, it’s a good idea for developers to be testing in this browser, as when it’s released, it will quickly become the standard (Microsoft is likely to roll it out as part of an automatic Windows Update)

Wow! If the beta version of the browser is anything to go by, web developers are in for a whole world of pain when it goes public, especially if they have legacy sites which were built using tables (Your web developer is building your site using table-less standards compliant XHTML and CSS, aren’t they? If you’re not sure, now would be a good time to ask!). I haven’t had a chance to look at why yet, but most of the sites I’ve visited which were built using tables for layout break badly in this new version of IE.

Whilst you would expect that there’ll be some minor tweaks to the browser before it goes live, you’d think that they’d have the rendering engine and basic HTML sorted out before they release a beta version.

Not so.

I was working on a site for a client yesterday. The site worked beautifully in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3, and Internet Explorer 7. Then I opened it up in Internet Explorer 8.

Hmmm…..

The layout seemed OK, but there was one small problem - named anchor links didn’t work. I googled, googled, and googled some more, trying to work out what was going on, then I came across this little gem from Microsoft:

Some URIs (Universal Resource Indicators) refer to a location within a resource. This kind of URI ends with a “#” mark that is followed by an anchor identifier. This is known as the fragment identifier. For example, the following URI points to an anchor that is named “section_2″:

http://somesite.com/html/top.html#section_2

When you click this link, it will forward you to the section of the resource that is labeled as the following:

<a name=section_2>

These types of links may not function in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Standards mode. To work around this issue, use the Emulate IE7 button.

What the hell Microsoft?

So you suggest that if something doesn’t work, users go back to the old version? Isn’t that a little like Ford saying that their new model has no headlights, so if you’d like to drive at night, you’ll need to use the older version of their car?

This is a BASIC function of HTML. I would have thought that things like this would have been sorted before you’d put out a beta version of a new browser!