Sounds familiar? Works on all browsers, except for IE8

I’m sure this is familiar to anyone who has done web development. Lucire has a new home page and the tests show:

Firefox on Mac, Windows, Ubuntu: OK
Chromium on Windows: OK
IE9 and IE10: OK
Safari on Mac OS X, Iphone and Ipad: OK
Dolphin on Android: OK
A really old version of Seamonkey we had at the office: OK
IE8 on Windows XP: not OK

   All the roman text is showing as bold, and as usual this is not a bug that I can find reported (I even looked on Google). I have found bugs about italics showing instead of romans caused by installation issues, which don’t apply here as we are using webfonts. There is another common bug about faux bolds and italics, but I’m having the opposite problem: a true bold showing up where romans should (and bold italic instead of italic).
   Annoyingly, this bug may have been with us for over a month—when we changed our body type.
   Given that IE8 was never a good browser to begin with, and anyone who cared about their surfing experiences would not have touched it, it makes me wonder if we should invest any more time trying to get things to work. It does mean that just under a tenth of our readers (or is it just over a fifth? Depends who you want to believe) won’t be able to experience our website the way we intended. I realize older IEs are more commonplace in China but our readership this year in the Middle Kingdom had dipped.
   The good news, in some ways, is Microsoft’s announcement that it will cease support for the venerable XP platform in 2014. If trends continue based on the first set of stats, the well obsolete IE8 should dip below the five per cent mark this coming year.
   It’s a toss-up between leaving it and fixing it, given that we don’t know why IE8 is misinterpreting the linked fonts (theory: are the character sets of the roman and italic too large for it to handle?). If we knew, then fixing things would be a no-brainer. (Clues are welcome!)


You may also like




2 thoughts on “Sounds familiar? Works on all browsers, except for IE8

  1. Reminds me of the problems webmasters had when maintaining compatibility with IE6, although that was a different set of problems.

    The good news, in some ways, is Microsoft’s announcement that it will cease support for the venerable XP platform in 2014.

    I’m maintaining a partition with XP, mostly for the occasional gaming, and, it looks like, production software (video editing in Linux is awful). I’ll have to figure out how to harden it further.

  2. Doing work efficiently is what keeps me on Windows—it’s the only platform with WordPerfect these days, I believe. I have an XP VM and a separate, old desktop machine that runs it, though the latter I may switch to Vista (I’ll have to purchase the extra licence). There’s one part of me that is thinking I should just give that last XP PC away—I’m already giving away several (both from myself and a friend) so what’s one more?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *