Should i get ie8

I looked more closely into the Asian stats, noting the proportion of IE8 usage for each country. Yes — even in ! Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.

Is it really such a surprise that there are still people around the world who are clinging to IE8? I decided to put myself in the shoes of one of these anonymous souls, and browse the web for a day using IE8. You can play along at home! Hmm, okay. Looks like the default web page pulled up by IE8 no longer exists. Well, that figures. Microsoft has officially stopped supporting IE8 so why should it make sure the IE8 landing page still works?

I tried searching for something:. The logo, for instance, is zoomed in and cropped. To enable HTML5 markup, you have to explicitly tell the browser these elements exist. They can then be styled as normal:. That is wrapped in an IE conditional , by the way. So I go about trying to set up a new one.

One way you can get around this is to use Sass to generate two stylesheets; one for modern browsers, and one for legacy IE. There were a few differences between how it looked in IE8 and a modern browser:. Whilst promising at first sight, the form was quite buggy to fill in. Then I noticed the little yellow warning symbol at the bottom left of my IE window.

I clicked it and saw that it was complaining about a JS error:. I was beginning to worry that email might be off-limits for a ten-year-old browser. But when I went to Hotmail, the signup form looked OK — so far so good:.

The only quirky thing on the form was some slightly buggy label positioning, but the signup was otherwise seamless:. The leftmost input should have been my first name, not my surname.

This shows the importance of accessible markup — even without CSS and visual association, I could determine exactly which input box applied to which label albeit the second time around! Anyhow, I was able to complete the sign-up process and was redirected to the MSN homepage, which rendered great. This is a clever fallback tactic, as Facebook need to support a large global audience on low-end mobile devices, so need to provide a basic version of Facebook anyway.

Why not offer that same baseline of experience to older desktop browsers? I tried signing up and was able to make an account. Oddly, Twitter is happy for you to log in, but not for you to register in the first place. I felt awkward about logging in with my existing Twitter account. Call me paranoid, but vulnerabilities like the CFR Watering Hole Attack of — where the mere act of visiting a specific URL in IE8 would install malware to your machine — had me nervous that I might compromise my account.

The news homepage looks very basic and clunky but basically works — albeit with mixed content security warnings. Take a look at the logo. Chris Coyier explains the technique in more detail.

I can see the headline, the navigation, the featured image. But the rest of the article images are missing:. This is to be expected, and is due to the BBC lazy-loading images. I was half expecting an empty white page when I loaded up Netflix in IE8. I was pleasantly surprised when I actually saw a decent landing page:. A text-align: center on this class would probably fix the centering for IE8 and indeed all old browsers.

The lack of background is due to use of rgba , which is not supported in IE8 and below. This is a very IE specific fix, however, basically every other browser supports rgba. The surefire way of ensuring cross-browser support would be to bake the filter into the background image itself. Simple but effective. Anyway, so far, so good — IE8 actually rendered the homepage pretty well! Wikipedia looked great, as did the Gov. UK government website.

Ideally we would write our CSS such that the default styling is for narrow mobile screens. Then using media queries , we can write CSS for devices larger than narrow screens such as tablets. We could continue the process targeting large desktop screens and even huge TV screens. We write our CSS such that the default styling is for large screens and work our way down. This is effectively mobile-last implementation and usually results in overriding a lot of CSS rules to remove stylings not needed at smaller screen sizes.

This results in a large amount of duplicate code between it and the CSS targeting the desktop screen sizes. All of these approaches result in additional code that would not be needed if IE8 had native support for the functionality.

Modern browsers get all of this just-for-IE8 code as well even though they have native support. Modern browsers are heavier because of IE8. Think about libraries like jQuery and underscore. But when you look at underscore. How much lighter would underscore. And what about jQuery? They introduced jQuery 2. This was a step in the right direction; moving the web forward. However, jQuery announced jQuery 3. The preferred jQuery 3. But there is also jQuery Compat 3. So much for the jQuery team not having to waste their time with IE8….

What happens when an animation is critical to some site functionality so you have to resort to using jQuery instead of making use of CSS3 transitions? What happens when your site relies on geolocation and in order to support IE8 you need to include a large library that uses IP address location when the geolocation API is unavailable?

What happens when you try to get IE8 to support functionality that it was never intended to support? You throw a lot more code at it and it runs even slower! Think about all the jQuery written by developers to simulate media queries, calc , and HTML5 placeholders.

The proliferation of UI frameworks is what has enabled developers to keep building more complex websites. One person or a group of people can invent a wheel and share it with thousands of people on Github.

The UI framework developers are also getting tired of having to support IE8. We already discussed jQuery, what they did with jQuery 2 and what they wish they could do with jQuery 3. Other frameworks are dropping IE8 as well:. Ideally if you officially support a browser, you should test features on that browser before shipping it to your users. How does one get their hands on a 6-year-old browser? A Microsoft-supplied virtual machine of course!

We at least have to applaud Microsoft for providing a way for developers, particularly those not on Windows, to test IE browsers. As a developer, which would you rather be doing?

Yeah, I thought so. In my opinion, the debugging tools in IE browsers are subpar compared to other browsers. The cost in having to fix bugs in a legacy browser is real.

At the time, they added a 6. All Internet Explorer browsers now have a bad reputation for being terrible browsers. IE11 is actually a pretty good browser. So in order to publicly share their disgust, Break Up with IE8 was born. There you can share your IE8 break-up letter with the public. And IE9 had more than IE But after these compelling arguments, IE8 is all but out the door.

And it might as well take IE9 and IE10 with it. And with Microsoft giving away free upgrades to Windows 10, soon most people will be on Microsoft Edge as well.

If Microsoft gets its way and everyone quickly gets on Edge, we only need to actively support 5 browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge. What a wonderful world that would be! All I ask is that you celebrate the verdict in style. Now my personal objective is to take this evidence to my team at Eventbrite and try to get IE8 kicked completely off the supported list.

Wish me luck! Differing opinion? Feel free to leave a comment or tweet me benmvp. How to add a gradient along an SVG circular arc path to create a loading spinner. Skip Main Navigation. Isn't the :before pseudo-element CSS2? Actually you should be careful here and read the detail.

For full details, see this link - which states. In Windows Internet Explorer 8, as well as later versions of Windows Internet Explorer in IE8 Standards mode, only the one-colon form of this pseudo-element is recognized—that is, :before.

Beginning with Windows Internet Explorer 9, the ::before pseudo-element requires two colons, though the one-colon form is still recognized and behaves identically to the two-colon form. Update: I misread the page! IE 8 does support :before with images, it just doesn't when it is in IE7 compatibility mode. IE8 supports :before , but not and also images as content when not in compatibility mode.

Kudos to toscho for testing! Detailed comparison of which browsers can deal with what sort of content. How I love quirksmode. The guy deserves a medal!

When using :before and :after, just be careful not to use double colons ::after - will not work, but :after will work. I lost about 20mins for this Works in IE 8, Opera and Mozilla. This is going off of Pekka's awesome example My heights on my project was to tall for the row So I added a padding-bottom: 0px;. How are we doing? Please help us improve Stack Overflow. Take our short survey.

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