Blocking IE8

[Miluette]

So I heard Xephernet main blocks IE8. :0

I had heard it blocks IE6, which no one should care about anyway, but why would it block IE8 (probably the first release of IE to actually be decent)?

I found out when someone mentioned not recommending Xepher as a hosting place for webcomics (although I would), even though Xepher does his every best to provide, and IE seems to work on every site that is not the main anyway.

The question was something like "if it blocks IE, what else will it bother to provide you?" Said even after I explained that every other hosted site has everything they should have provided to them, and works in IE.

[tickyhead]

Having just logged on in IE to prove a point, xepher main does not, in fact, block IE8. At least not from my end. Maybe this someone is just misinformed?

[Miluette]

I know of at least two people who reported going there in their very current versions of IE and getting the blocking page.

I just went there in IE8 to check myself and got the blocking page, too. Notably, when I clicked IE8's "compatibility view" button, which would show how the site looks in old versions of IE, to view the site, the block went away. Iiinteresting.

Something to look into, to be sure. Now that I've seen it, the blocking page doesn't really serve much of a purpose, and Xepher.net isn't so complex a page that it shouldn't work in older browsers. (This is said by someone whose sites actually don't look TOO bad even in Mac IE5, which just lacks a lot of modern CSS functions I use.)

[griever]

It's not really a block, it's more like a welcome rant.

[Miluette]

Yeah, I noticed that, too. S'why I said it doesn't serve much of a purpose, either... lol. (Although it would be good if any IE6 user who wanted to join Xepher would upgrade their browser, it's still not especially pertinent or impactful here.)

[Xepher]

It's setup to warn about using IE because IE 6 and older show the front page completely broken. As was noted, it's not a "block" because you just continue on anyway, and it's just warning stuff may look broken. That said though, there's an exception for IE7 (which didn't suck as much), but I haven't put one in for IE8 yet because it hadn't occurred to me, since IE8 just recently came out (more recently than I last used windows.) I fixed it now to allow IE7 and IE8, but I don't have anything running IE8 at the moment, so I won't test it until next time I reboot. Let me know if it doesn't work.

[Databits]

Psh, what you talkin' about? People still using IE6 need to be blocked from the entire internet!

Also, IE7 is more or less IE6 + png transparency. Not all that much of an improvement. Frankly, IE6/7 are worthless browsers which cause more headaches for developers and designers than they do good. Hand it to MS for totally ignoring specs and just doing things how they think it should be done. IE8 really improves on a lot of things, but still isn't quite up to snuff. IE8 also is the final IE to ever be released. The project has FINALLY been discontinued after this point by MS (supposedly in favor of some new browser not called internet explorer and possibly using webkit, which would be awesome).

[Miluette]

LOL, IE is discontinued? Awesome. XD

I will direct the misinformed to this thread! <3

By the way, if you ever feel like torturing yourself (you'd have to be really bored), open up your site or any site in Mac IE5. I have it, for some reason, on my mac, and apart from being mind-killingly slow, everything in it looks atrocious - partly because of all the new CSS stuff that wasn't around then, but also because it's an old disgusting mac adaptation of IE, aaagggh.

[griever]

Speaking of IE6, Xepher....

http://imgur.com/Tfg6J.jpg

[Xepher]

Heheh... See! I'm not so draconian after all!

[Databits]

Seems the new codename for the successor to IE that MS is working on is Gazelle. A technical document can be found here.