I’m in the exact same situation. I work for a government agency and cannot installed alternate software on my computer. I hate to have to do this, but if this isn’t fixed, I’ll also be requesting a refund and trying to find an alternative. I agree that IE8 is obsolete but many of us are just stuck.
The main issue is not that they don’t allow updating the browser, it’s most likely that they are still running WinXP, like a lot of firms (for good or wrong reasons).
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
No, the problem is that there are often very viable business reasons that a company sticks with obsolete technology. Not every one can just up and change something without impacting a ton of downstream systems. Many of our applications were built and tested on IE7, and we made an effort to test and upgrade them where necessary to IE8 only a couple years ago. When IE9 came out, we were still an XP shop. Why? Because the business community rejected Vista and Windows 7 was unproven, and the smart business decision - one that thousands of companies made - was to stick with XP. And that in itself meant no IE9. I’m not privy to the decision, but when we made the conversion to Windows 7 - which was by no means a light task - we had the opportunity to go with IE9. We didn’t, I assume because the effort and opportunity to test and correct our applications to make sure they worked in IE9 was more effort than deemed acceptable than to just stay with IE8. Things get old, but there is a critical decision that needs to be made whether it is cheaper to patch or to totally redevelop or to do neither. Cavalierly suggesting that “you just update your browser” is myopic. It is not that simple of a decision.
I was able to install Chrome Frame plug-in in IE 8 without Admin rights, but can you add
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-COMPATIBLE" content="chrome=1">
to you pages so it kicks in when I visit newsblur.com?
(See http://www.chromium.org/developers/ho…)
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I haven’t tried Chrome Frame yet, but I’m going to… as for getting Chrome Frame to work, try one of the options on this page (easiest seems to be adding “cf:” before the URL): http://www.askvg.com/force-microsoft-…
then he shouldn’t be surfing here either. “Ole Network Admin” Get Back to Work!!!
FYI, I installed Chrome Frame on IE 8, and did get Newsblur to work. The prefix I had to use is “gcf:”. actually, the URL I had to use is “gcf:https://newsblur.com” (yes, with the https because otherwise it defaults back to IE).
To get the “gcf” prefix to work, I had to add a value to the registry (using regedit) - specifically, added AllowUnsafeURLs as a DWORD with a value of 1 under HKCU\Software\Google\ChromeFrame. I did have to add ChromeFrame as a new key.
Having said all this, if Samuel could add the meta tag, then that would be cleaner! As a side note, I noticed the Gmail is opening automatically inside Chrome Frame, so I don’t get that IE8 incompatibility message anymore…
Actually, Google Reader still supports IE8.
One more note… when I do log in, the URL gets redirected to http://newsblur.com then to https://newsblur.com (without the gcf: prefix), but then since I’m already logged in, I can go back to gcf:https://newsblur.com and it seems to work fine from that point on.
Samuel, Newsblur no longer works for IE9 or IE10, also. Was dropping IE support intentional?
re: IE9 and 10 - I doubt it’s intentional - Samuel develops on a Mac, and probably didn’t test properly. If he doesn’t already use Karma for testing, it’s a great reason to do so.
“and the effort now to redevelop those applications is not worth the payoff; it is not worth the support head aches to have a two approved browser policy”
You just described exactly the reason that he doesn’t support IE8–the amount of work to develop, maintain, and debug multiple versions of the code to support a browser very few people use is not worth it.
I also use IE 9 at work, for the reasons listed above (re IE 8), and would really love if it worked again.
Both Chrome and Firefox work in Windows XP, so even if they are stuck there, newer browsers could be installed.
“Support” is different from “works”. Google’s policy is to only support IE9 and IE10 (at the moment), which means that they guaranty things will work in those browsers. They don’t purposefully break older browsers, but if I want to do something that isn’t part of IE8 that won’t stop them from including it (and then breaking IE8). Simple things might be something like nicer animations which would just mean IE8 users don’t see them. Something more complex could be a new feature of JavaScript that IE8 doesn’t understand, in which case the page will break completely.
IE10 is working for me.
Is there any likelihood or facility to return to the old layout somehow on a per user basis? While it wasn’t perfect under IE8 (and I was fine with that, given the previous comments that it wasn’t supported) it was at least functional, unlike the new one.
This comment has a threatening tone, especially considering I have not once been condescending or impolite. I generously offered refunds to anybody who wants one. And this extends to anybody who has a premium account using IE, not just the ones who purchased it in the last month.
I’m not supporting IE8 because it’s a minuscule fraction of my users and takes a disproportionate amount of time to code around. I’m actually quite astounded you took this tone, since I am hardly the first company to discontinue IE8 support. Reading the other comments on this thread you’ll notice that not only are there multiple newer versions of the same browser, but even Google discontinued support for IE8.
It would be infeasible to support both, I’m sorry to say.
Also, there is a perfectly workable Chrome Frame solution you can use.