Google Maps and Friend Connect weirdness in IE8

I received a bug report about my website. The maps that appear on my UK postcodes pages weren’t working in IE8. I hadn’t noticed since they were working fine in IE9 but when I switched to compatibility view in IE9 I started to see the same problem. This helped because I was then able to debug my JavaScript (much as I love IETester, I’d love it even more if I had access to the developer tools for each version of IE). And debugging the script revealed google.maps was null.

At this point I assumed this was a problem with my Google Maps script, so tried loading Google Maps asynchronously then tried specifying an older version of the API. Neither helped. I tried inserting the script in my HTML head but with no luck.

Finally I had a look at the google object and saw the only thing defined in there was friendconnect. Now my suspicions moved away from Google Maps to Google Friend Connect. my Friend Connect stuff appears at the bottom of each page and the script reference for it was also down the bottom of the page. So I thought I’d tried moving the Friend Connect script reference to the html header. And voila, the maps started working again.

So the conclusion? I’m not really sure, although I suspect Friend Connect is removing the google.maps object, although it seems odd that it only happens on IE8.

JavaScript not executing in Internet Explorer 8

I’ve been caught out by this on numerous occasions and still haven’t learnt my lesson. So in an attempt to remember in the future and perhaps help somebody else out, here’s the situation. Take the following script declaration

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" />

This may look valid and probably should be, but Internet Explorer thinks the script tag hasn’t been closed, which means any script blocks after it will be ignored. The declaration needs to be

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"></script>

writing-mode: tb-rl broken in IE8

Vertical text in a web page can be pretty damn handy. I’ve used it in our documenter for Metastorm BPM procedures where we have some grids with columns which would become too wide if the column headers used horizontal text. OK, it only ever worked in Internet Explorer, but given the add-on is for an application that only runs in IE on Windows, I wasn’t too concerned by that.

Now, along comes IE8 and vertical text no longer works properly. Grids are incorrectly sized when they contain vertical text. Try this in a HTML page.

  what the...
  <table border="2px">
    <tr>
      <td style="writing-mode:tb-rl">Some text</td>
      <td style="writing-mode:tb-rl">Some more text</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
  .. is going on in that grid?

And this is what that will look like (obviously view in IE8 to see the problem)

what the...

Some text

Some more text

.. is going on in that grid?

Which is disappointing… Ah but you’re not here to see the problem are you? You want to know how to solve it I guess. The only solution I’ve found is to add the following to your head element, which forces IE8 to render the page in IE7 emulation, which means you miss out on all the new rendering goodness in IE8.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

Update – You’ll probably need to manually force IE to switch to IE8 standards mode to see the problem, seems that MS has decided BlogSpot sites are not ready for IE8, so this is running in compatibility mode.

IE8’s compatibility view is not IE7

It would appear that IE8 has been released today which coincides with me finding out something unpleasant about its compatibility view. I’d assumed switching to compatibility view would show the web page using IE7’s rendering engine. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Go to the Process Mapping website and try out the dropdown menus. When you move outside the boundaries of a menu it should disappear, as you’d expect. Using IE6, IE7, IE8 (native mode), FireFox, Safari and Chrome that’s exactly what happens. But in IE8’s compatibility view the menu stays where it is.

So I can only assume compatibility view is not IE7 in new clothing. Given that anybody can switch to compatibility view for whatever reason and returning to that site will stick with that setting, this means that the introduction of IE8 means rather than having one other browser to test against, we have two instead! Oh great…

How to confuse IE with a 302 redirect

It’s very simple, create a PHP pages called test.php, the contents of which are

<?php
  header("Location: test.php");
  exit;
?>

Now point IE8 (probably earlier versions of IE as well I’d guess) at the page and watch as it tries in vain to fetch the page. It eventually times out, after trying to fetch the same page over 1000 times (take a look with Fiddler to see the problem). FireFox and Chrome are much more sensible in this scenario and give up quite soon. As the dumb developer who caused this problem, it took me quite some time to figure out my redirect wasn’t working rather than the website being very ill

Turn on script debugging!

The other day I was pointed in the direction of a new website for a company I know. The owner was very pleased with the work a web design agency had done for him. Unfortunately the first thing I saw was a script error, then another then finally the page appeared. Pretty nice it was too, but the whole experience was somewhat spoiled by those script errors. Of course most people have script debugging turned off so they don’t see these errors but if you’re paying someone to develop your website it is something you need to do.

I wouldn’t recommend having it turned on all the time, the fact is the web is almost unusable if you do have script debugging enabled. Some websites cause so many errors that the only solution is to kill your browser and a large number of high profile websites have some kind of script error. Of course, some would say this is only an IE problem and point to the crappy way IE implements the debugger notification in a modal dialog box and that is certainly true. Perhaps it was done that way so that it is so in your face, that if you’re the developer of the site you just have to do something about it. I think the actual consequence is that anybody who has turned it on turns it off at the earliest opportunity.

But I digress, the point is if you’ve paid somebody to develop your website, make sure they’ve actually done a decent job, even if the only people who’ll notice they haven’t are anal geeks like me.

Windows Search now slows down Internet Explorer as well

One of the things that caused bad initial experiences of Windows Vista was Windows Search. As soon as you'd installed Vista, off it went indexing files on your hard disk. This could take some time and although it runs as a background task it still seems to impact the performance of your PC. Lots of people just turned off the service, although if they'd left it on for a while they'd have discovered that once the initial scan had been finished, it generally had a pretty low impact on system performance.

I left it on but I've never been overly happy with it. Fact is I don't do much searching on my PC and when I do I'm not too bothered if it takes a while. So having a constant tax on my performance (however small) seems a waste. Not only that, but it doesn't seem to index the files that are important to me. So when I do do a search I invariably have to switch to the 'search everything' mode which is really slow meaning the whole indexing palaver is completely wasted. I guess I should have set it up to index everything but never bothered, thinking it would cause the indexer to use up even more processor time.

But along comes IE8 and Microsoft have decided to use Windows Search technology to power the drop down list of suggested sites. Previously I'd used this a lot, type the first few letters of a site that I visit frequently and it would appear in the drop down list and I could select it rather than having to type the full URL. In theory that still works, but Windows Search always takes several seconds to decide what to show in the list, so it's as quick just to type in the full URL. I guess the list of suggested sites is better but the delay means it's completely useless. And typing another letter causes the search to start again from scratch...

But there is a solution to this. Disable the Windows Search service and the drop down works just like it used to do and I'm happy again. I guess this is a classic unintended consequence of powering IE8 with Windows Search, that even more people disable it.

IE8 not ready for prime time

I downloaded and installed IE8 beta 1 primarily to have a look at the new XDomainRequest object which allows for cross-domain requests. Unfortunately that old problem security gets in the way. Although the documentation implies it is possible to make requests to any server, it appears the server has to explicitly support the new request protocol. Ho hum.

Anyway, IE8 screws up lots of pages (most notably Google Maps) and although it claims to have an IE7 emulation mode, using this mode seems to make no difference at all, as far as I can see. So time to uninstall, at least until the next release...