https:// – An Issue with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)

IE8 Issues

With the arrival of Windows 7, more and more users will of course be using Internet Explorer version 8 (IE8). As usual, there are issues with the new version of IE.

One issue that has become evident is related to encrypted websites. All of our online registration systems are encrypted; you may notice that you access them via https:// rather than via http://. The ‘s’ represents that you are using a secure and encrypted connection to the server. Ordinarily, when on the 4-H website, when you click on a link to enter one of the event registration systems, you are taken to a login page. If you are using Firefox, Opera, Safari, or one of the other modern standards-compliant web browsers, you would be taken directly to the login page and everything would be fine. With IE8, when you click on a link that points to an https:// web address (as with our registration systems), you will be asked whether or not you want to view external content that exists outside of the web page.  This is a security feature of IE8 and has been implemented for your protection, but for the average computer user, this is probably more of a nuisance than anything.

The visual appearance of our web pages are all defined using what are called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); these are a handful of pages that are connected to all pages on our website.  The idea is that when you want to make a change to the layout or appearance of your website, you can make changes to your CSS files and the changes will take place across your whole website; this technology makes life much easier for web developers.

“Do you want to view only the web page content that was delivered securely?”

IE8 is essentially asking if you want for the web page to load the CSS content.  The “Yes” button is highlighted by default, so if you just hit your Enter key on your keyboard, you’ll be specifying that you do not wish to view content that is not directly part of the page that you wish to access.  If you select Yes, you will see the text content of the page minus any of the visual formatting:

If you select “No”, then you will be allowing the defining content from our CSS pages to be loaded into the page, and you will see that the page visually looks as it should:

Other IE Related Issues

Every version of IE is a bit different in how it renders web pages, and it seems that web developers are always having to come up with various “hacks” and fixes in their code so that things will display properly in various versions of IE.  Many of the other web browsers that are freely available are designed to be W3C standards compliant, and although IE seems to become a bit more compliant with each version, there always seems to be issues that we developers have to work around.  As of the time this article was written, Colorado State University officially supports the following web browsers: IE7, Firefox3, Safari, Mozilla.  The University Extension Technology Unit supports IE7 and Firefox3; however, in general, we try to point people towards using Firefox for their daily web browsing.  Because Firefox does not utilize Active-X controls (unlike IE), there are often times less virus issues when Firefox is used.  You can download Firefox for free at their website: http://www.firefox.com

Disclaimer: the content of this article are not necessarily the opinion of Colorado State University or of University Extension, but are the sole opinion of the article’s author.