I have been developing some applications with Vaadin for a number of months now. I use mostly Firefox and occasionally Chrome on Linux. The other day, someone brought up my application on IE8 under Windows and it looked terrible - I have a file system Tree object that appeared to have all the strings truncated to 3 characters, among other things. I have not investigated this much yet - I’ll have to get a Windows box and do some experimenting…
But in general, does anyone know of any issues related to using Windows/IE with Vaadin programs? Anything I should have to do to make it compatible with other browsers? I have not tried Opera, for example or Safari…
The core themes (reindeer/runo) works perfectly with Internet Explorer 6-9. The problems arises when you create a custom theme and don’t take into account the quirks of all the different browsers. So if you do any custom css, always test.
Other than that, it should work well. Do your testing and share more info when you have it.
I will try all those suggestions - thanks very much. But first I have to dig out a Windows machine… I tend to avoid Windows myself, so I won’t get to this for a day or so… I will report my findings here when I do.
I confess that the IE8/IE9 compatibility mode is a pain. I don’t really know, but I think there are tags to tell it NOT to use compatibility mode which might be helpful since all Vaadin apps should not do so. If that was added to the standard Vaadin page, it might help us all who have users who somehow get them into compatibility mode.
That’s what we are doing for our proiject - unfortunately, the bloody-stupid-IE-intranet-flag trumps all - i.e. even if you say “Render as IE8” by using the , if the site counts as an Intranet site AND if the use-compatability-mode-for-intranet-sites is on (and by default, it is), then compatibility mode is used.
It is a very good idea NOT to support IE. Chrome is available on Windoze and I never had problems switching my users to Chrome. In fact, in many cases, they thanked me for that later.
I always tell my users that my application works on IE but use Chrome for better performance. Also, I generally do not provide support if they run my applications on IE.
While I agree to your sentiments about IE (I rarely use it except in final testing, and mostly use Chrome and Firefox), it is not practical to drop IE support as there are far too many users in the IE camp, and lots of businesses have lame policies that preclude the installation of better browsers.
It makes no sense, but IT shops in big corporations still are stuck on IE6. You’d think the fact they are stuck on a browser now 3 generations old would be evidence enough that using IE is not in their interests. But somehow they cannot migrate intranet apps built on standards non-compliance after many years, suggesting they should all be fired, but that’s not the way it plays out.
Sadly, ever time we get a “your site doesn’t work” report, we have them turn off compatibility mode and “magically” the problems go away!
Heck, we have one JSP page using a Java applet that won’t work in IE8/IE9 standards mode, and we actually have that page run in compatibility mode. Yet that page works fine in all of the latest Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera browsers. The mystery of IE remains!
I know… I know… IE6/7 might have forced few million lines of extra code written by web developers and still around like a virus. Luckily, I never wrote a single line of IE specific code myself
