Monday 17 January 2011

Internet Explorer: Real World Compatibility Examples

    I was asked last week for some real world examples of some application compatibility issues. Especially, an example of the kinds of compatibility issues that we might experience with Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 8 (IE8).
    Quite amusingly, while I was on the phone with the guy, I was trying to book some parking here in the UK. Specifically, using the NCP car park website, which I have included a screen-shot here;
    I immediately hit the following Microsoft Security error;
    This is quite a simple issue and relates to how a web page uses a mixture of secure objects (HTTPS) and most likely non-secure images (HTTP) or other content. Under Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) this is not an issue as IE6 does not check for secure and non-secure sources.
    And then we see the next issue, is that page does not complete correctly due to scripting errors as demonstrated here;
    And here:
    Luckily our automated application compatibility tool (AOK) can scan, crawl and then capture websites and then report on them for potential application compatibility issues. So, we loaded URL in question (www.ncp.co.uk) into an AOK database and ran our AOK Browse-It Internet Explorer compatibility Plugins against the captured results (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML tag entries) and then generated some results.

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