Developing against IE6, IE7, IE8 and soon IE9

Question

In approx 6 months when IE9 is unleashed web developers could have to support up-to 4 versions of IE. This is very likely to increase support, development and testing for many.

I know Win7 has XP mode to run IE6. IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode (which is not perfect), what happens when IE9 is released ?

Will there be an IE7/8 mode for IE9, will we be able to install IE9 alongside IE8 ? Or what about Vista mode to run IE7/8 ? Or do you think Microsoft will make a statement about IE6 having limited support, please do not use any more ? What are you ideas/plans/strategies to ease/cope with this pain (plain not supporting IE6) ?

Cheers, Nick

Answer 1

You should use the IE app compat VPC images for testing.

Answer 2

Official Microsoft support for IE6 will end in 2014, along with Window XP. That is already decided. (in fact, it should have ended already but the end-of-life date was extended by a couple of years when MS extended the end-of-sale date for XP after the Vista debacle)

So after 2014, anyone running XP or IE6 will be out of support. There will still be people using it, but the corporates that have been holding out will be forced to move on as they tend to be quite risk-averse when it comes to having unsupported software on their systems.

Supporting IE9 should be a lot easier than IE6/7/8, since it is standards compliant in ways that its predecessors weren't. The code you write for other browsers like Firefox should work in IE9 relatively unchanged. There are obviously going to be modern HTML5 features that IE9 doesn't support or does differently to everyone else, but if you're having to support IE6/7/8 you won't be able to use those features anyway.

If you're in any doubt about how IE9 will work on your site, you can download the developer preview now and try it out.

By the way: For some useful browser compatibility charts, I recommend the Quirksmode site, which will tell you exactly what features are supported by which browsers.

For what it's worth, our company has officially stopped supporting IE6 on our site.

Answer 3

For those who are wondering if IE9 supports IE7 and IE8 compat mode, yes!

Answer 4

IE8 not only has the compatibility mode, but also includes the full IE7 renderer for development and debugging, which is next to perfect. I'm not sure if IE9 will have this feature as well.

IE6 already has limited support, but unfortunately it is still used a lot, because of other software depending on it. If for example you run a webshop, you need to support IE6. Maybe as little as 5% of your visitors still use IE6, but not supporting it could mean 5% less profit.

For developing and testing I would use virtual machines with the different browsers. That way you can have any browser you want on any OS you want, without having to use things like IETester (which is instable) or the various hacked stand-alone versions of older browsers.

Answer 5

In addition to @jeffamaphone's suggestion this blog post explains how to test in IE7, IE8, IE9 in parallel using separate Virtual Machines on OS X. It's quite simple.