IE8 Display Issues

For the record I have tried to clean up the code on the page and I have deactivated every plugin one by one, testing on IE8 as I went, but to no avail.

IE8 is neither HTML5 nor CSS3 compliant. It never will be as it has been retired by MS, is no longer supported, and will have no updates (XP versions). You should advise anyone using that version of IE to use another modern browser or update IE. While Windows Vista and Win7 will run IE8, each of those OS’s has service packs that update the browser to later versions. Everyone should be running the latest service packs so no one should now be using IE8.

And I will add this also:

https://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/?task=statistics_2014

Of 6 advisories, 3 are ‘critical’ and unpatched as of this date (and may never be).

So, Pioneer Valley Web Design Member, are you suggesting that it’s acceptable to use a plugin such as ‘Stop Oldies’ which blocks IE8 and advises the user to upgrade to a new browser?

I came across this ‘solution’ earlier, but felt like it’s a cheat, but if I can’t find a suitable solution to the problem then I’ll use it.

I would love to ignore the problem this way but about 1/6th of the site’s traffic is via IE8, at least that is according to Wassup-Stats.

TOP BROWSER
4303 Chrome 34
2982 Chrome 33
2780 IE 8
2273 Firefox 28
2070 Mobile 11D167
1798 IE 9
1351 Firefox 27
1183 Mobile 11B554a
1052 IE 6
1011 Mobile 11D201

TOP OS
7040 Win7
6764 iPad
5543 WinXP
4313 Win7 x64
3082 MacOSX
2447 WinNT 6.1
1843 WinVista
1158 WinNT 6.3
1018 Linux
790 Win8 x64

I know that IE8 is problematic…but I’d love to find a solution.

The original theme I worked with (Sixty One by CSSIgniter, with fantastic support) works in IE8 – I’ve double checked the demo.

However I modified the theme, probably quite carelessly, and ended up with my own header and front page. Now, it doesn’t work in IE8. I have as yet been unable to pinpoint the mistake that I made. Of course the code could be full of typos too which wouldn’t do it any good.

None of your site visitors are using IE10 or IE11? That is alarming to me. Windows8 does not and never included IE8. But, when we use tools with names like ‘wassup’…(I shall leave that for you to review).

Yes I did think it strange that IE8 is the most popular of the Internet Explorer browsers. However it was bundled (I think) with Win 7, so anybody who bought a computer with IE7 and doesn’t know much about computers is still coming to the site…those stats are for the last 5months only, excluding spam and robots.

Can you recommend another, possibly more reliable Stats plugin?

I went back to an older version of my header and rebuilt it from there. Now the header looks like it’s supposed to, the front page slider is presenting correctly and all other pages work well in IE8.

I still have an issue with the Featured Posts/Pages section in the lower half of my front page. The images are stretched. If this is as bad as it gets, I can live with it! These are all featured images for different posts and pages. Should I specify the size of these images so they will work nicely in IE8?

If so, how do I go about doing that?