Are You Ready For Internet Explorer 8?

Microsoft are widely expected to release the last preview version of Internet Explorer 8 in the new year, with the full release following shortly afterwards. In many respects IE8 is a major upgrade to the browser, with many new features and better adherence to web standards.

New features in IE8 include Accelerators (which allow web pages to register themselves in the browser as search engines for content on other websites) and Web Slices (page snippets users can subscribe to). Both of these features provide ways to drive more traffic to a website and increase customer loyalty. Support for these features can be added to existing websites - contact us for more information.

Previous versions of Internet Explorer did not always recognise web standards (published by W3C). Indeed many sites have in the past been built to look good on IE, rather than adhering to standards. IE8 changes that, being "standards compliant" by default. Therefore websites that work perfectly on IE7 may no longer look correct or work properly. Websites with this problem can be quickly modified to ask IE8 to go back to IE7 compatibility, but this isn't a long term solution. Rebuilding a website to meet current standards is the only way of insuring it will look good and work well on a wide variety of browsers in future.

Supporting older browsers is now becoming less of an imperative, for instance IE6 usage is steadily falling away and is now under 20% with free standards-based browsers like Firefox continuing to rise in popularity. However if legacy browsers need to be supported options do exist for creating multiple web builds targeted at different platforms and devices.