IE8 & IE7 formatting issues

The best fix is to upgrade to IE9 or IE10, or use Google Chrome or Firefox instead.

If you were a desktop app developer, and someone called and insisted “We run Windows XP in our office and your program doesn’t work!”, or *”Our office uses OS X 10.4 and and your program doesn’t work!”*, you’d probably take a deep breath and explain to them they were 7 years behind the times, and that there’s a minimum-expected standard of technology they need to meet to use the latest software.

IE7 is far past it’s shelf life, and IE8 will be coming up on it’s end-of-life as well. Less than 1/8 of the entire Internet is using Internet Explorer (any version) now, with Google Chrome being the dominant browser.

I’m not trying to be a jerk, nor am I a developer of the “Front-End Editor” plugin, but anyone who insists that Internet Explorer 7/8 be supported is obviously not terribly computer savvy and needs to be given a wake-up call.

I noticed the Aloha Editor was still listing IE8 as supported at https://aloha-editor.org/supported-browsers.php as of November 2012 (which is the date that was listed on the page when I checked it). However, that doesn’t mean the Front-end Editor plugin supports IE8.

Just to see if I could find any issues, I tested with IE8 on Windows XP and I couldn’t reproduce the problem using the Aloha Editor demo site: https://aloha-editor.org/demos/wordpress-demo/ (just as a basic test, it doesn’t let you save)

Then I tested with the Front-end Editor 2.3 on a WP 3.5.2 blog with IE8 on Windows XP and I found that my revision saved for my test post content before editing on the front end looked like this

This is a test post

link <a href="https://www.google.com/">one</a>

link <a href="https://www.wordpress.com/">two</a>

link <a href="https://yahoo.com/">three</a>

The revision saved for my test post content after editing on the front end looked like this:

<P>one</P>
<P>two</P>
<P>three</P>
<P>This is a test post</P>
<P>link <A href="https://www.google.com/">one</A></P>
<P>link <A href="https://www.wordpress.com/">two</A></P>
<P>link <A href="https://yahoo.com/">three</A></P>

And it looked liked this when I viewed it via Firebug Lite in IE:

<p><P>one</P><br />
<P>two</P><br />
<P>three</P><br />
<P>This is a test post</P><br />
<P>link <A href="https://www.google.com/">one</A></P><br />
<P>link <A href="https://www.wordpress.com/">two</A></P><br />
<P>link <A href="https://yahoo.com/">three</A></P></p>

Google discontinued IE8 support last year: https://googleappsupdates.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/supporting-modern-browsers-internet.html

I don’t think it’s very likely work will be done to extend support to IE8 for this plugin unless you contracted and paid for that to get done (assuming a developer would be willing to take it on, which they might not).

?? Long story short, I agree with upgrading, or switching to a different browser such as Firefox, if at all possible.