IE7 breaking Web applications

Internet Explorer 7 among tomorrow's Windows Updates

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/10/09/ie7-among-tomorrows-windows-updates/

Posted Oct 9th 2006 5:44PM by Jordan Running

"Tomorrow is Patch Tuesday at Microsoft, and the Washington Post's Brian Krebs says it's likely that among the patches we'll see tomorrow will be Internet Explorer 7. That would mean that everybody who has Windows Update set to automatically install patches will reboot to find a brand new IE on their desktop. Microsoft has declined to comment, but has confirmed that IE7 would be shipping this month. Patch Tuesday seems like the obvious opportunity. Krebs also says that one of IE7's most-touted features, its security "containment wall," won't be present in the Windows XP version of the browser."

Also see this blog entry on blog.washingtonpost.com.

IE blog: IE7-Is-Coming-This-Month...

If you haven't done yet, it is high time to check if the web applications you have built or the ones you are using will still work.

All web applications that are hardcoded only to only with IE5.5 or IE6 will stop working once IE7 is installed. As we discovered with the WCMS we use at one of our customers: once logged in with IE7, this message showed up:

"Your system does not support the minimal required browser version to use [...].
Upgrade your system to a supported version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Check the documentation for more details."

Hm... minimal required browser version? upgrade your system??? Our technical leader sent an urgent e-mail to the WCMS technical support. They replied:

"An official statement will follow soon, as an unofficial update: assuming this is for Release [...]  we will most likely issue a hotfix on very short notice. I would recommend to uninstall IE7 when it is installed via the automatic updates when the [...] fix is not ready yet."

So we did some further investigation to assess the situation. We found the following interesting posts:

Workaround for Internet Explorer 7 troubles

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/10/10/workaround-for-internet-explorer-7-troubles/

Posted Oct 10th 2006 9:15AM by Jason Clarke

"If Microsoft does push out IE 7 during Patch Tuesday, you may find that some of your favorite sites don't work properly, or at all anymore. While testing the beta versions of IE 7, I found a number of sites that simply wouldn't come up at all, however worked perfectly under Firefox. If you run into that problem, but still would prefer using IE, consider downloading something called the User Agent String Utility version 2 from Microsoft. This has been freely available from Microsoft since the first beta versions of IE 7 were made available to testers. It's a simple utility that when run will launch an IE 7 window that will report its user agent string to web servers as IE 6.
Of course, the problem may not simply that the web server is expecting a specific version of IE, but surprisingly this workaround does work in many instances."

This download from Microsoft that makes IE7 emulate IE6. As far as I could test, this seems to work for our WCMS. There is a possibility however that some of it functions will be broken, e.g. in page editing.

Agent String Utility: www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Blocker toolkit

on blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive

"We are also providing a Blocker Toolkit for our enterprise customers who may want to block automatic delivery of IE7 in their organizations; this blocker has no expiration date. Enterprise customers can download the free Blocker Toolkit from the Microsoft Download Center today. We’ve also made additional information for IT administrators available at the Windows Update/Microsoft Update site on TechNet."

The Blocker toolkit is available on: www.microsoft.com/downloads/

What about Web developers who have to test in different browsers?

Having IE6 and IE7 on the same computer is impossible... or is it?

Advice from Microsoft: install a virtual machine or buy a second computer. Really!

There is a standalone IE6 version available at: browsers.evolt.org

First tests indicate that it would be possible to test CSS with it, but at least on XP, it has some strange behaviours: favorites don't open: they open the Print dialog box instead; the Eolas behaviour is different from the real IE6: in the standalone you get a popup warning every time javascript writes a flash object

There is another site which offers a solution: weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive