: How to correctly deal with corporate customers that have outdated browsers Many of our customers are on corporate networks where they have no control over their browser versions, etc. We have

@BetL925

I know you're asking about IE8, which as many here said - you should support. But let's say you really can't recreate their problem for some reason, you can try what we do when we have to deal with orgs running IE6 internally (you won't believe how many there are in Israel): we make the case to the IT team to allow them to install Firefox and/or Chrome. This often involves begging and pleading (very strategic tactics). In most cases, they allow it and that becomes the browser of choice for our client within the org.

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@Sarah324

I work for a uni as a web dev and IE8 is a real ball ache! A script I had developed that worked perfectly on my local version of IE8, was messing up on the uni build PC's also on IE8. I could not recreate the problem on my machine, like I saw you said in a comment, then I noticed I was using 8.7.xxxx.xxxxx but the uni machines where running 8.6.xxxx.xxxxx ... the two versions seem to differ a lot ... I'm guessing this may be your problem recreating your erhhh problem, I know this messed me up! You can grab version 8.0 from Old Version. I'm guessing if it works in 8.0 it will work for 8.x.

In answer to your main question, you need to deal with it. IE8 still has a chunky share of the browser market, although IE8 doesn't have any possibility to grow, only shrink, we still need to cater for the users. Web development would be easier for a lot of people if we didn't have to deal with the messed up layouts and ignorance towards established web standards ... but at the end of the day, its competition, the devs on IE do a lot of cool stuff, I just wish they had a 6week update policy like chrome so they can fix the cool stuff that goes wrong!

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@Harper822

Honestly, make your site work with IE 8; it has fairly good support of CSS <3 and JavaScript. If there are some minor issues with IE, use conditional comments. If you're using HTML5, at least use html5shiv, but you should probably use Modernizr, which includes html5shiv.

If your theme doesn't support IE <8, either make a derivative or child theme, or use a different theme. Here's WordPress's official guide to developing a theme.

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@Alves908

One of the best options is to make them install the Chrome Frame plugin: code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
The benefits are:


Your wordpress site will load as if they had Chrome.
Other sites, including their corporate tools, will still render in IE8.
They won't have to upgrade their browser.


You will need to add a meta tag to your wordpress site. There is also a wordpress plugin to do that: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-chrome-frame/

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@Goswami781

Make your site play well with IE8. Really.

IE8 isn't all that outdated. Unless your site is made solely to cater to them, in which case it should have been made to work with what they have in the first place.

You don't have control over what they run...they don't have control over what they run...but you do have control over what you serve. So the answer seems kind of obvious.

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@Sherry384

This is a product and policy question, not a technical question. However, I deal with a similar situation - we host a website that is based on a vendor's product, and it has a compatibility list. That list is given to our customers as part of their statement of work. If they can't run the browser(s) that we say our site works with, they don't get support for those browsers (or can even choose to not be customers.)

If the customer's company is buying your service, they need to be aware of your compatibility list. This isn't very different from them buying software to run in their own environment - if it requires SQL 2008 but they only have SQL 2005, it's up to them to either try to make it work, upgrade to the supported version, or not buy the product.

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