IEInternals Blog IE8 FAQ
Add-ons Tweaks Web Development Add-on Development Troubleshooting Contact 
Windows Internet Explorer 9 was released on March 14th, 2011
Beta-1 of IE8 was released on March 5th, 2008.
Beta-2 of IE8 was released on August 27th, 2008.
RC-1 of IE8 was released on January 26th, 2009.
IE8 Final was released on March 19th, 2009.

Where can I install IE?

http://microsoft.com/ie/ 

Known issues

IE7 "Strict" pages fail to render correctly? 
IE8 user-agent is blocked?

Click the "Compatibility View" button compatviewbtn in the toolbar.

Tips and tricks

How do I install IE7 over IE8?  How do I uninstall IE8? 

Use the system Control Panel to remove IE8 (beta or final) versions. 

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700/ for more information (or this help topic for Windows Vista). 

When you uninstall IE8, your computer will revert back to whatever version of Internet Explorer you had previously.

 

Issue: How can I tell what rendering mode a page is in?

Hit F12. Look at the Developer Tools toolbar or Emulation tab.

 

How can I troubleshoot other problems like crashes or hangs?

Please see Troubleshooting tips.

 

Issue: Creating new tabs is slow?

Usually, this is caused by poorly-performing add-ons.  Please see Troubleshooting tips for information on running IE8 in No Add-ons mode to verify which addon is the culprit.

 

Issue: DHTML Menus on SharePoint or ASP.NET sites appear blank?

A hotfix is available to correct the buggy HTML generated by ASPNET.  See http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/03/23/asp-menu-fix-for-ie8-problem-available.aspx.

 

Issue: The browser takes a long time (>5 seconds) to start?

This can happen if you have a huge number of sites listed in your Restricted or Trusted sites zone.  Some tools, like "SpyBot Search & Destroy" will place thousands of sites in these zones if you use their "immunize" feature.

This may also be caused by poorly-performing add-ons. See above.

 

Issue: Visual Studio Wizards do not work properly when IE8 is installed.

 See http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/03/28/some-vs2005-and-vs2008-wizards-pop-up-script-error.aspx for the workaround from the Visual Studio team; it consists of setting one registry key.

 

Issue: Inline autocomplete doesn't work in IE's address bar

This was a by-design change; the workaround is to hit SHIFT+ENTER to automatically open the best match. This gives the closest approximation to the IE5/6/7 user-experience available in IE8.

Changed in IE9; Inline autocomplete is back and on-by-default!

 

Issue: When I use the Visual Search Suggestions feature, all images show as a red-X

While network problems are a potential culprit, we recently determined that when the user has disabled QuickTabs (inside Tools / Internet Options / Tab Settings) GDI+ is not properly initialized and hence the search suggestion images will not render.

Re-enable QuickTabs to fix this.

 

Issue: When I hit CTRL+F, a blank white bar appears instead of the expected "Find" bar

This usually means that some program (e.g. an antispyware) deleted some important registry keys.   Try this:

1> Go to a command prompt (run as Administrator).  Enter the following three commands, one at a time.  

  • cd \  
  • c:\windows\system32 
  • regsvr32 oleacc.dll  

2> Restart.  


©2024 Eric Lawrence