Thread: IE9

I went and poked around in vBulletin's bug tracker and this is a known issue attributed to vBulletin code. So that's a relief and should be fixed soon. I still find all this nightmarish though. Particularly the obvious situation in which a web page can look better (and correct!) in IE 9 in a rendering mode other than what the browser chooses for us. But oh, well...

In the meantime I've been looking into ways of using Tracking Protection as an effective means for ad blocking. I think Microsoft did their best to make this hard for you. I clearly remember an option that allowed you to load a local file list, for example. And that option exists no more. In a way I can't blame them. Makes sense they want to avoid adblocking as a browser feature. But there's very little in the way of addons too. It's either payed ones, of the free ones are frankly uninteresting (to say the best). Either I can't turn it off for selected sites like Cboard, or doesn't facilitate access to its block list, etc...

Tough call I have here. Making the move to IE 9 is something I wish to do. But I'm letting go of one important addon and bumping into some rendering engine choices that I'm not sure I like at all.

Originally Posted by User Name:

Does it still have an issue with rendering when you specify the standard with a doctype?

[ignore]Nope. In that case it works well.[/ignore] I mean, Yes. It ignores traditional doctypes. Sorry, only know realized your question.

It requires however specific targeting by specifying IE known X-UA-Compatible headers. Problem is, many developers never cared, don't care now, or won't ever care in the future. vBulletin, for instance as no such header. Yet these headers where a requirement already for IE8 rendering modes. And this is a commercial solution, so you can guess what these headers may mean to non commercial software developers...

That is, IE largely ignores the traditional DOCTYPE headers in its decision on what rendering mode to use. In the absence of such a X-UA-Compatible header it will fall back to some emulated mode I quite didn't grasp yet. On the case of CBoard, for instance, this means rendering it in IE7 mode. I suspect what it does is check features in the source code of the page to be rendered and choose from there. So, if there's an old tag there, or rendering errors (especially CSS), it falls back to IE7 or even quirks mode. My own homepage at Quiettech, Quiet Technologies doesn't include a X-UA-Comptible header or META, yet it renders in IE9 standards mode because it's fully compliant.

So, IE9 has this great rendering engine. The greatest and the latest, full compliant, and actually better (or on par) with the best the competition has to offer. But what happens?... IE will only use it if there nothing in your webpage that it hiccups about, or if you include a X-UA-Compatible header or META.

In the real world, this means a vast portion of the websites will not render in IE9 mode. And when you, the user, manually change the rendering mode to IE9 you get a better visual result and a nicer website. Ridiculous!