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Design

Joe Li
Joe Li
8,104 Points
Posted by Joe Li
Joe Li
8,104 Points

Any tips for fixing a site that runs on IE8??

Hey Guys,

Just ran my site on browser stack and everything looks great apart from IE8. On IE8 it looks like someone has vomited on my monitor.

Does anyone have any tips that will help make it look reasonably normal? The site is running on Wordpress and Bootstrap.

Thanks,

Joe

3 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points

I would need to see it, or be more descriptive than just "vomit" to really provide a quality issue, but my guess is that you are using media queries, and IE8 doesn't support media queries.

If that's the case, you can add to a conditional stylesheet for IE8 browsers only, which include the code you need, but no media queries.

You can also take a look at libraries like respond.js https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond

Good luck, IE8 has gained a lot of hate over the years. Luckily it's old, market share is small, and now that Win XP is unsupported IE8 usage should continue to fall to nothing. FWIW, most large front end librarys like Bootstrap and Foundation have or will be dropping IE8 support in their next release. Don't bang your head against the wall too much unless you know you're getting a larger than normal IE8 usage.

Christian Ebner
Christian Ebner
12,132 Points
Christian Ebner
Christian Ebner
12,132 Points

Hi Kevin,

you can use CanIUse to answer the question ;). Seems to be supported in IE8.

To Kevin's point: I would only go through supporting IE8 today if I absolutely had to - for instance - in an enterprise environment or governmental organisation that still uses IE8/WinXP. Otherwise I'd drop it.

Joe Li
Joe Li
8,104 Points
Joe Li
Joe Li
8,104 Points

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for your response really helpful. I hadn't even gotten onto checking the responsiveness yet! Is max-width %'s on elements an issue on ie8? What would you recommend as a fix?

Thanks,

Joe