eyt*
Jun 14, 2011

Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Mode...

Earlier today, myscenicdrives.com released our road trip planner which I am really excited about. There are several more features that I want to build into it, but this was a really nice time to release it and get some feedback from real users.

For the last week, we have been doing some usability testing, optimizations, cross browser testing, and polishing it all up before the press release earlier today. With the final push going out the door late last night, we did our final round of testing and under Internet Explorer 8, I got that dreaded, “A problem displaying [site] caused internet explorer to refresh the webpage using compatibility view.” This resulted in a huge effort to figure out where that message from coming from.

The majority of the testing was done in the latest version of all browsers, which I was really pleasantly surprised at how standards compliant Internet Explorer 9 is. While I had to do a few tweaks specifically for it, it was relatively easy and no more than what I had to do for other browsers. When I cracked up Internet Explorer 8 (via Microsoft’s virtual machine image), it required a lot more tweaks but in the end, it seemed good.

This is why I was really surprised when I loaded up the page last night and saw the compatibility view message. Unfortunately, that message does not provide any insight into what the problem might be. The Microsoft documentation on the matter states that your pages must have a DOCTYPE and validate, but they also hint that there are other undocumented reasons — this makes finding the root of the problem orders of magnitude more frustrating.

After changing things I thought might be suspect, endless googles for any hints, and etc., I started commenting out various chunks of code trying to make it go. At the end, I had a simple empty page with nothing between the opening body tag and the closing body tag, and it was still happening! But this was illuminating because right above where the body tag came out was one little optimization we had done recently.

When usability testing, we noticed that there was a lag in images being displayed which was not user-friendly. To help prevent that problem, we looked into image prefetching techniques, and fell upon the CSS technique:

  1. body:after {
  2. content:url(image.png);
  3. display:none;
  4. }

This made a world of a difference in testing. According to my research, this technique is suppose to be ignored by browsers that do not support the :after clause and so it felt safe. Since the images in question were very specific to the application being developed and the page in question is not intended to be read by search engines, we decided to inline this code on the page.

Could this be the cause? Well, in trying to narrow it down further, I did comment out the entire style-tag and sure enough, my page did not go into compatibility mode.

This fixed my compatibility-mode problem and hopefully it may help someone else out there.

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