The first Beta of IE8 has been released for developers. And, yes, I have a copy.

First impressions? Well, apart from the first run after the install hanging, and it prompting me during the install for how I’d like it set-up and then not doing what I asked, it’s gone relatively smoothly I’ve not had a chance to look at the new features yet, only to try out my sites. And they break. Not badly, but they break.

The most immediate solution to this is to add the following to your HEAD (which I found in a Whitepaper)…

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

This will force IE8 to display the page as it would in IE7. It’s not ideal but when IE8 is doing strange stuff with your web pages that no other browser is, it makes you wonder whether it’s worth changing your code (especially as this is a beta… some of those breakages may not be valid). I’m loath to change my sites based on a beta, but at the same time don’t want IE8 going live and my sites not being ready… the above META tag is the ideal solution.

Never-the-less I’ll keep IE8 installed on my home PC. I found a solution for running IE7 separately (I already do for 5.01, 5.5 and 6) so I can continue to test with that.

The default home page for IE8 has lots of useful links to resources. There are also release notes available, a “readiness toolkit” and lots more available at the IE Developer Center.

Right. It gets technical now.

It seems my problems at work where my laptop takes an age to sign-on is due to it making a copy of your profile onto our LAN. For “roaming” purposes. Therefore the more you have in your profile folder, the longer it takes.

So I set about reducing this down. And in the process, I came across a number of useful workarounds and general tips.

As part of this (because IE puts its temporary files in your profile folder) I’ve created a “Temporary Files” folder on C:\ (both at home and at work) where I’m trying to get as many apps as possible to put their cache, temporary folders and general bog.

So far I’ve found that I can move IE Temp Files, Firefox Cache, OpenOffice Temporary Files and Java Temporary files. All in a single neat folder, out of the way.

Oh, the reason I’m doing this at home as well, is because it reduces the amount I’m regularly backing up, if I can remove the bog to a single folder out of the way.

Anyway, here are a couple of workarounds to problems that I came across too…

Move Firefox Disk Cache

• Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar and press Enter.
• Right click on the resultant screen and select the option to create a new string value.
• Name this entry browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
• The content should be the location of where you wish the cache to be located

And that’s it done.

Move a Firefox Profile

• Shut down Firefox
• Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyProfile
• Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Firefox on Windows Vista, XP, 2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
• In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. If you are using a non-relative pathname, the direction of the slashes may be relevant (this is true for Windows XP)
• Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
• Save profiles.ini and restart Firefox

I’ve often been criticised for using tables in my website. I only really use them where I’ve found it necessary, but never-the-less, one table is often one too many for some. “Bad design”, etc, etc.

Well, I’m working on a re-design of the Copy+ site and have been attempted to banish tables from the site entirely. All looked well as I tested it in IE. Then Firefox. Oh my. It was a real mess. I tried to sort it, I really did, but eventually became stuck.

A post to discussion board yielded the following answer.. “the top menu ‘catches’ on your logo_box DIV.” The answer is to add “clear: both;” to my DIV.

So I asked how I was supposed to know this. The answer…

Same way as me. You do something, it doesn’t work, so you google it!

I use it so often that I have it defined as a constant in my PHP.

The other thing that I have done is that I get so fed up of fudging inconsistencies between browsers that I now detect the user’s browser and give them an appropriate css file, not a jack of all trades with indecipherable hacks in.

The conclusion… I’m not supposed to realise this. Instead I have to hack about to get the DIV’s right, probably losing sleep and hair in the process.

But, if I use tables I can get it right first time, without any of the above. Hmmm. Guess what I’m now doing to the new site??