The Accidental Developer » internet explorer

Testing for multiple versions of Internet Explorer

Chris Herdt — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:43:56 +0000

Only one version of Internet Explorer (IE) can exist on a single windows installation by default. I had previously used Multiple IE as a way of testing web pages on older versions of IE. This allows you to have IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 installed alongside your existing IE7 or IE8 install. You can even run them concurrently.

I don’t test pages on anything earlier than IE6 anymore, but IE6 still accounts for more than 5% of my site traffic. Multiple IE basically helps me test both IE6 and IE8 from the same machine. However, there is still the IE7 gap, plus Multiple IE, which is no longer being updated or maintained, can produce some glitchy behavior.

It turns out, though, Microsoft offers some tools to help test their legacy browsers.

Microsoft offers several Windows virtual hard disks (VHDs) that can be loaded using Virtual PC. If you run IE8, you can download VHDs that include IE6 and IE7, and run them through a virtual environment.

Two drawbacks compared to Multiple IE: the VHD files are huge (some are 800+ MB), and in my experience, the virtual machines run hopelessly slowly. (The latter may be due to my environment or my Virtual PC settings.) However, it does allow you to test web pages on fully-functional versions of IE6, IE7, and IE8 without maintaining separate testing machines.

I’m running VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX (Leopard), which allows me to test Firefox and Safari on the Mac, as well as the PC versions of the browsers through a Windows VM. I could presumably create separate VMs for IE6 and IE7, although that may not be kosher with Microsoft’s licensing for my copy of Windows XP. It is frankly easier, however, to run Virtual PC through my Windows VM, than to install Windows XP twice more over.

Create an XSL stylesheet for your RSS or Atom feeds

Chris Herdt — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:16:44 +0000

Internet Explorer 6 and, curiously enough, Google’s Chrome browser, don’t display RSS or Atom feeds in a particularly helpful manner. IE6 displays neatly-formatted XML, with color-coding and indentation, whereas Chrome displays the text node of all the XML tags without so much as a linebreak:

Slashdot's RSS feed in IE6 and Chrome, respectively

Either way is completely intimidating to an RSS novice. Fortunately, we can change that.

Both IE6 and Chrome will apply an XSL stylesheet, if one is specified. To specify a stylesheet, insert the following code right after the DTD:

I created a bare-bones XSL file to transform RSS 2.0 files:
rss2.xsl

Voila! The RSS feed now displays some information telling the user what RSS is and how to use it.

Of course, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and other modern browsers give the user some pretty click options that allow them to add the feed to their RSS reader of choice with the click of a button. There’s really no reason we couldn’t add code to achieve the same effect to our XSL file. For example, just view the generated source (using a tool like the Web Developer Toolbar) of an RSS feed displayed in Firefox and copy or further customize the code.

(I’m sure I’ll get to that in my copious free time.)

This brings up a good question in my mind, though: why do the modern browsers override publisher-specified XSL stylesheets? I’ll admit that it adds a certain helpful consistency to all RSS feeds, but it seems peculiar. I suppose that since so few RSS feeds have custom XSL stylesheets, it is better to apply a single style to all. It’s an idea that is bad in theory, but good in practice.

(And you can always change your Firefox settings to customize how it handles Web Feeds. I thought I could trick it into displaying my styled feed, but I recommend against using Firefox to open web feeds with Firefox: I started an infinite loop.)

Testing Tools

Chris Herdt — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:52:05 +0000

A couple of useful testing tools I thought I’d share:

Multiple IE – Put IE3 through IE6 on your Windows box (without interfering with your IE7 installation)
Flash Switcher – an extension for Firefox 3 that will allow you to switch between older versions of Flash Player

The latter seems a little buggy, but still easier to use than removing and installing different Flash versions yourself.

Why Doesn’t TinyMCE load in IE?

giblfiz — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:19:32 +0000

looks like it is all due to the insertAdjacentHTML call being used in another library. In my case, wz_tooltip. Oh wow did this hurt me. So that horror of a project that keeps on poking its head up sent in another small request… put tinyMCE or FCKeditor into one page on the website. Offered 5 hours. Well TinyMCE is already installed, so I figured this was a chance to recoup a little of my loss on this project. Sure enough, I activated TinyMCE with about 5 lines of code, checked that it worked in Firefox, and billed my money.

Next morning I get a call. The thing doesn’t work in IE. So I try a few quick and obvious things, move around where it gets loaded, try a few different load orders. No luck. Grr. I was going to type out my whole damn process, but I realized that’s not what people want to read…

Short version is: the wz_tooltip.js library conflicts with the TinyMCE library ONLY in Internet Explorer. This is because of a call to insertAdjacentHTML which is an IE-only javascript call (thanks again for embrace and extend M$). As a workaround, you can modify the wz_tooltip file by commenting out from line 397 (inclusive) (thats: if(wztt_body.insertAdjacentHTML) ) down to line 400 inclusive (thats : else if(typeof wztt_body.innerHTML != wztt_u && document.createElement && wztt_body.appendChild) ) And now I’m off to submit bug reports.

What a waste of a morning.