Joen Asmussen presents a method of directing IE8’s rendering engine:

The new rendering engine of IE8 was supposed to be more standards compliant, yet the CSS engine still follows Microsoft’s own rules, so the net result is that IE8 still can’t render advanced CSS layouts. The solution is to add a meta tag to tell IE8 to use the IE7 rendering engine; then you don’t have to target two browsers.

Then Google launched Chrome Frame which embeds Google Chrome’s superior rendering engine to IE. But it’s a plugin so it has to be installed and it has to be invoked using a meta tag.

Combining the two meta tags, so that we use Chrome Frame if available, but fall back to using IE7’s rendering engine if not, results in this meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1; IE=7" />

Joen tested this on a recent site and tells us that it works as advertised.

Handle IE8: Use Chrome Frame If Available, Fallback To IE7 originally appeared on Noscope on November 2^nd, 2009.

A JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG’s work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

You’re giving administrative access to the installer so that it can be installed, you’re also allowing it to modify other parts of your system… A reason to hate Windows? No, but definitely another reason to love Mac OS X and Linux. The trickery used in such installers isn’t new and I think it’s really sad to see no one caring to complain about a procedure like this on Windows.

Rachel Andrew:

Browsers these days are actually pretty good. Most of the time, if I have built and validated something and it works in Firefox, I can be pretty sure that when I do my testing in the latest versions of Opera, Safari, Konqueror and yes even IE8, everything will be fine. This is what we asked for, back in the early days of the web standards movement, and I do think we are getting to that point.

If modern browsers tend to deliver a consistent experience when presented with valid, sane CSS and (X)HTML this only makes more frustrating the sight that we are presented with in older versions of Internet Explorer – version 6 more so than 7, although both have their issues.

As someone who does a fair bit of non-trivial CSS development I thought I would share my practical tips for dealing with IE.old.

Xenocode virtualizes the operating system services seen by the application, and provides a virtual view of the filesystem, registry, and so on. This lie is complete enough that even third-party OS utilities believe it, and report that the code is running from Program Files directories that don’t exist.

So far, it looks like it really works. It’s a great way to get multiple IE support on one machine.

An amazingly detailed series of essays by Shamus Young culminating in an amazing Windows screensaver that generates an entirely procedurally-generated cityscape, at night, with lighting… without a single graphical texture. Absolutely stunning work.

A “must have” for web-designers everywhere.

Understanding computing history is very important because, if you look across the sweep of it from the 1940s to today, it’s much easier to see where we might go next.

A tool like grep, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

A Graphical User Interface (GUI for short) allows users to interact with the computer hardware in a user friendly way. Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, Amiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more. Webdesigner Depot takes a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.