Some of the conditional comments are working such as 'gt
' and 'lt
', but for example
<!--[if IE 8]>
is not working. This surely is inconvenient for developers who want to try how their webpages look on different versions of Internet Explorer browsers, but it is not all bad news.
Although the conditional comments aren't working, you can still test how your webpage looks in each of the Internet Explorer versions by appending the stylesheets one at a time: let's say you got a stylesheet for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11 called 'screen.css
', and another stylesheet ONLY for Internet Explorer 9 called 'screen-ie9.css
' and another one ONLY for Internet Explorer 8 called 'screen-ie8.css
'.
To test your webpages ONLY for Internet Explorer 9, you can do this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path/css/screen.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path/css/screen-ie9.css" type="text/css" />
and in the F12 developer tools, Emulation section, set the 'Document Mode' to '9' and the 'User agent string' to 'Internet Explorer 9'. The Document Mode is the Standard that Internet Explorer 9 uses and the User agent string is the browser itself.
P.S: I'm assuming that the 'screen.css
' is your base stylesheet which is the reason I am calling it first than "overwriting" the Internet Explorer 9 fixes later by calling 'screen-ie9.css
' second.
By doing this, you can be "sure" (I have to test with VMs in order to write the word 'sure' without quotes) that you are viewing your webpage on an Internet Explorer 9 browser. When you are done testing and styling on Internet Explorer 9, and you want to test with Internet Explorer 8, you can easily do the same trick by replacing this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path/css/screen-ie9.css" type="text/css" />
with this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path/css/screen-ie8.css" type="text/css" />
So, it is just a matter of MINOR inconvenience from Microsoft's side, BUT the new F12 developers' tools are offering LOTS of amazing features, which makes this not that much of a big deal.