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Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

I was helping out my wife the other day to use some work-related internal site via VPN. I had just finished putting a clean Win7+IE9 install on her PC only to find out that this large-ish enterprisey portal only works in IE8. Everyone always touts these reasons as why old versions stick around forever, but when you see one in practice you realize how crippling it can be for both sides because nobody necessarily even owns the site (e.g., built by outside consultants) and the end users have no real say to get it fixed. If there is no in-house technical owner, the chance of it being updated anytime soon simply because a new browser version is available is next to nil. I feel, in situations like this, it is probably not until the department/whatever head personally encounters the issue on a new computer that a top-down mandate comes to fix the situation.

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Doesn't putting the browser in IE8 compatibility mode work? I guess it sucks for an end user to need to use a developer feature like this but could be the best option.

All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML and it throws IE9 and later into IE8 compatibility mode:

I was surprised to notice that the BBC website does this. I noticed because a bookmarklet I wrote which requires IE9 won't work on the BBC site, which was quite disappointing.

All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML

No.

If they're in a situation like this, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone has the knowledge necessary to do this, let alone the time, inclination, or (perhaps most importantly for enterprise companies) business approval. The vast majority of enterprises cannot just publish production code at their own discretion.

Having done the equivalent for a gnarly enterprise web-app when IE8 came out (using mod_headers to inject the HTTP header equivalent) this isn't trivial and they may not have anyone with the necessary skills who is jumping to take on testing and support (everything which happens with that app for the next 6 months will be first blamed as an upgrade problem).

Beyond that, it doesn't actually work: some features won't be completely compatible so you're effectively creating a third browser to test and support. In the case of IE8, it was mostly IE7-compatible but it relied on the browser not throwing errors when JavaScript attempted to set syntactically invalid styles and IE8-in-IE7 still raised exceptions deep in a third-party library licensed by the app vendor. This app was made by a very large, wealthy company – we were paying mid-six-figures a year for "support" – and they preferred infrequent massive update releases, which meant that a week after I reported the bug (around the time Microsoft started pushing IE8 as an automatic install) one of their managers contacted us asking for the patch I wrote so they could redistribute it to other customers.

This is why I won't work on enterprise systems.

IE9 has a way to put it into IE8 compatibility mode. Do these kinds of sites not work in Compatibility Mode? Press F12 to switch the mode. It's a good option for using a better version of IE while still supporting older sites.

Does this mode exist in IE10 as well?

Yes, IE 10 has IE 6 (Quirks), 7, 8, and 9 mode.

There's a sad story waiting to be written about the developers that have had to spend so much time deliberately introducing bugs into IE10 to make this feature work.

Nah, they just plug in the old Trident renderers. "Browser mode" changes the user agent, and "Document mode" changes the renderer. The JS engine remains the same, which is why you always need to test in the real deal.

Document mode changes JS compatibility, at least in IE9. I doubt they dropped that in IE10.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/24/ie9-s-document...

No, IE 10 has IE 5.5 (quirks — IE6 was where quirks mode was introduced), IE7 "Standards Mode", IE8 "Standards Mode", IE9 "Standards Mode", IE10 "Quirks Mode", and IE10 "Standards Mode".

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ie8-mode.png is a flow-chart of the modes and switches for them as of IE8.

In my experience, the IE* compatibility mode don't capture 100% of the quirks compared to working in the browser directly.

I use a win8 vm for IE10, win7 for IE9 and run copies of XP mode within win7 for IE 6-8

Not only don't they capture all the quirks, but they introduce new ones. I had an issue a year back, I can't remember the exact details unfortunately, where IE8 in compatibility mode for IE7 was causing some weird behaviour that didn't happen in either IE7 or 8.

To make things even more confusing there is both a "browser mode" and a "documents mode", both containing all the versions of IE7,8,9 plus documents mode containing IE9-compatibility-mode whatever that is. Setting any combination of the two options is valid.

For me.

I can only view my Broadband & Mobile both site in IE7,8 Mode. Other browse gave me exception "Unsupported browser".

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