Internet Explorer 8: Sample Compatibility Results

OK - I admit it. I promised this a little while ago and it took me longer to produce some of the results. I blame TechEd Europe in Berlin... and the week after, which was just as manic!
I wanted to spend a few minutes discussing some of the AOK Internet Explorer Plugins that we have developed for our clients to analyse their web applications for Internet Explorer 8 web-application compatibility issues.
Loading web-applications applications into AOK is pretty easy, as we follow the same basic principles as loading desktop applications. It can be a Drag'n'Drop operation from an IIS source directory, a web URL (i.e. http://www.changebase.com/ or http://www.microsoft.com/), or we can capture client data and complex application logic through our Client Side Capture tool.
Here is a quick sample of applications (non-client of course) that I have already loaded into AOK;

And, once you load your applications into the AOK database, you can then check your applications against our collection of  Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Analysis, from which I have included a small sample here:

And look at the results...

It's going to take a while to explain all of these issues. I wont' be able to cover all these issues in this posting, but there are some which are pretty straightforward; Version Checking and Case Sensitivity are both common issues and computationally pretty straightforward to understand. Other IE8 compatibility issues are more difficult to detect, such JavaScript and conditional logic issues.
As AOK parses the websites and related JavaScript code, we have to completely understand the syntax and the intention of the JavaScript, and then interrogate the result to determine real compatibility issues that may be experienced by a client viewing a web site or web-application through Internet Explorer 8.

Here is a quick summary of some of the issues, that AOK discovered when interrogating a number of URL's and web based applications.

As you probably won't be surprised here, the biggest IE8 compatibility issue is not strictly Internet Explorer's fault. It's nasty, bad developer types who have not catered for Internet Explorer 8. And the result is that the biggest issue is Browser Version Checking. You will hear more about this in the next post on this blog... Don't worry - I won't rant. Don't need to.
I have data to support me.