Application Compatibility Logging in IE8

The latest Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) release, ACT 5.0.5428.1080 is publicly available and can be downloaded here.

To give you some background, ACT helps customers understand their application compatibility situation by helping identify which applications are compatible with Vista, IE7, and IE8 and which require further testing. ACT allows compatibility data to be uploaded from individual machines to a central location for analysis, grouping and reporting. Once an issue has been identified, help will be available on how to resolve a particular issue or create a workaround. Furthermore, partners and customers using ACT are able to post comments to the Online Application Community, where they can share data and information about application compatibility testing.

The IE components of ACT are:

• Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool (IECTT). The IECTT helps identify your Web-based issues, shows your results in real time, and allows you to upload and view the data in the Application Compatibility Manager (ACM), a part of the ACT toolkit. As you test your application or site, the IECTT records events in real time when compatibility issues occur. For instance, if one of your sites injects JavaScript to another site and the IE8 Cross-site scripting (XSS) filter detects this as a reflection attack, a Cross-Site Scripting Filter event would be logged in the IECTT UI.

• Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluators (IECE). The IECE can be deployed within an enterprise and will help identify Web-based issues in the background. As you test your application or site, the IECE records events in the background as they occur. You will be able to view the logged events in the ACM after you upload them.

Overall, these tools help customers lower their costs for application compatibility testing, prioritize their applications, and deploy Internet Explorer more quickly.

The work flow for identifying application compatibility issues before rolling out a new version of IE8 is shown below:

1. Install the latest version of ACT and IE8.
2. Either deploy the IECE to a body of testers or use the IECTT and enable logging.
3. Begin a regression test pass of all line of business applications and sites.
4. Once a compatibility event has been encountered, diagnose the problem and create a suitable workaround or fix.

New Application Compatibility Events added in IE8

We added logging for twelve new Application Compatibility Events in IE8, as shown in the table below. Including the IE7 events, we now currently log 31 compatibility events. The Internet Explorer Compatibility article contains more information on these events.

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility article

In the past, we noticed that the ACT tool helped identify the compatibility issues that occur in a line of business application or website, however, the tool itself did not provide any guidance for remediation. In IE8, we are providing a resource that gives exactly that information. The article is linked directly in the IECTT logged message or is directly available here. The article covers the following topics for all IE7 and IE8 compatibility events:

• Logged Message – This is a copy of the event description that you’ll see in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool.
• What is it? – This is an elaboration of the logged message explaining what the event is. Additional references are provided when available.
• When is this event logged? – This is a short description of what has to happen in your Web page for this event to be logged in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool.
• Example – Most events include examples that demonstrate how to make the corresponding event create a log entry in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool. These examples help make the description of the event more concrete.
• Remediation – Guidance on what you can do to eliminate the incompatibility from your Web site.

We will be adding additional examples and remediation to this article before the final IE8 release.

As you can see, we refined our Application Compatibility logging in IE8 and have provided a useful resource in the IE Application Compatibility article. We look forward to you trying it out and giving us feedback in the IE newsgroups.

Jatinder Mann
Program Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 23, 2008
  PingBack from http://hoursfunnywallpaper.cn/?p=7547

• Anonymous
  September 23, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2008
  I think this is a great new resource!

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2008
  i don't know where else to post this, but can you please, please, with sugar on the top, bring back the Alt+m, enter shortcut to get back to the home page? please? Alt+home is awkward, especially for 1 handed people (i'm not one of them, but i have a friend who is). thanks.

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2008
  I have a question: http://attachpic.sogi.com.tw/upload/200807/200807161346030.gif 1.From the firefox,i saw the picture was fast. 2.From the IE 7/8Beta 2,i saw it was slow. why ?

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2008
  Allow user to middle click the url link in Smart Address to open in a new tab.

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2008
  @idonknow Since it is an animated GIF image it might be affected by this bug in IE. http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2007/11/bug-208-onload-event-fires-for-every.html The tracker doesn't indicate if this is fixed in IE8 or not but i'm guessing we would have heard about it if it was. My guess is that because IE is trying to hook into every single frame of the animation to do (whatever?) it just isn't very optimized.  I don't think the internal code to handle the image rendering has been touched since IE5 (except for the partial fix for PNGs) BTW the image loads just fine in my Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera but it is very slow in IE7 too. REAL slow.

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2008
  @ justin Thanks justin. so IE is quite different from the others browsers. :)

And another question: On Vista, I used the IE 7/8 browser and I tried to upload lots of my data to the FTP server. why the IE 7/8 took a lot of times to show me the "Computing time" ?? I waited very long  time and again that it still showed me "Computing time" and sometimes crashed. 2.The info "computing time",it was too very long. 3.IE sometime crashed.

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2008
  @idonknow -- I seem to remember that Netscape had a minimum frame time when playing animated GIFs, so presumably IE copied this to become compatible with the animated GIFs that were reliant on this Netscape quirk.  And since there are likely such animated GIFs still out there, IE will probably always continue to display them this same way.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2008
  To:General Manager Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson Gentlemen  I would like  to see on the IE blog.  A announcement or title for the UI changes or a discussion on the  UI.  IE blog Team has done a lot on the features built-in to IE but has ignored the UI.  Yes I do have issues with the UI, it just seems to me Dean that Microsoft is ignoring them.  To put it in perspective Microsoft's new battle cry or catch phrase is "Live with out walls" yet Microsoft has put up a wall with IE 8's UI. thank you for your valuable time gentlemen. "Vita Per Moenia"

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  Heya IE Team !! I know you guys are working hard hammering on IE8 for features and stuff, but I have to note something ... Performance needs to be attended to. Things like memory consummation, process usage, etc. But more important is the Javascripting engine; it needs to be sped up ... A lot. Sure, Acid2 support, awesome. But isn't that more CSS than javascripting? Why? This IS the browser wars 2.0, and IE is getting slaughtered if it wasn't for being preinstalled in the majority of PCs and for users who don't really care. Those that actually follow whether or not there will be updates or new releases DO care, and I am worried about how IE8's scripting will fall behind Mozilla 3.x's TraceMonkey and Google Chrome's amazing web application speeds. IE team, please work on performance. We really need you guys to be at least on par with other browsers in terms of speed. Features, yeah, continue to work on those, but I feel as if it is important to get closer to Acid3 compatibility and get faster in terms of performance.

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  Please reconsider the colors used as the background of the address bar when there are EV certificates or certificate errors, especially in Vista with Aero turned on (see the screenshot: http://www.divshare.com/download/5468121-dd9 ; the text is barely readable). May be a lighter/brighter shade of the background color or a white font would be better. Also, when a drive-by download is blocked by the information bar, could the name of the file be shown? And when multiple add-ons are blocked or there an add-on is blocked alongwith a pop-up, the name of the blocked add-on(s) is not shown. It just says "Pop up blocked. Also, to help protect your security, Internet Explorer blocked other content from this site. Click here for options.." ( http://www.divshare.com/download/5468122-afe ). We need the name of the blocked add-on to decide whether to allow that or not!

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  keyboard shorcuts for add to favorite button

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  Guys, stop complaining about the memory footprint. Can't you see that Ballmer is a PC, and he loves his company? He's working on it!

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2008
  Please reconsider the design of the tab of IE8 of Windows Vista.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2008
  I'm not sure where else to put this, so I'll put it here. There is a rather common rendering bug I've noticed in "old" pages where large chunks of text are not displayed until someone clicks on text nearby the undisplayed text.  I'm not sure if this is actually what a "proper" use of the old quirks would actually do, but it is rather annoying and it's behavior I don't notice in Firefox.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2008
  I'm not sure if this is by design, but the Accelerators pop up, even if you have empty space or an empty element selected. Looking good so far - keep it up!

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2008
  Improve support for standarts W3C, Acid3, CSS 2.1 and 3.0 and javascrit and pass the test with 100 / 100

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2008
  Improve support for standards W3C, Acid3, CSS 2.1 and 3.0 and JavaScript and pass the test with 100 / 100

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2008
  Add function view background, block page, block advertising, block Web,restore tab,download all the images,copy link,copy link image

• Anonymous
  October 01, 2008
  @lockon Acid3 test does not say anything significant about being standards compliant. It just says something about being acid3 compliant. Acid3 is more a competition for browser developer than a serieus standards testsuite.

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2008
  @Rado: Simply click BROWSE and then paste in the full file system path into the dialog.  This is the same in all latest-version browsers except Opera. The hosting application cannot file the file upload control using the DOM when using the DOM APIs, because these are the same APIs used by javascript.

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2008
  Hi. In previous posts I talked about the IE8 IEAK and new event logging for IE8 in the Application Compatibility

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2008
  The latest Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) release, ACT 5.0.5428.1080 is publicly available and

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2008
  I have a vb script that uses an instance of IE through Automation. It works perfectly in IE6/IE7, not in IE8. This is an example: Set objExplorer = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application") objExplorer.Navigate "about:blank" objExplorer.Visible = 1     objExplorer.Document.Title = "Test" objExplorer.Document.Write "<body>" & vbcrlf objExplorer.Document.Write "Can you see this?" & vbcrlf objExplorer.Document.Write "</body>" & vbcrlf msgbox "ok" objExplorer.Quit The first "Write" faults with "Unexpected call to method or property access" message error (8000FFFF) How can i test scripts like this with IECTT? With Compatibility Mode Settings (IE7 for all sites) the code works. :(

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2008
  @Rado: It's not an issue of malware, it's an issue of malicious Javascript.  And yes, there have been a ton of attempts to exploit file upload controls over the last few years, in ALL browsers.  Hence the change.

• Anonymous
  October 13, 2008
  В прошлых сообщениях я рассказал о IE8 IEAK и новом способе учета событий в IE8 реализованном в Application

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2009
  With the release of the Windows 7 beta , there has been a lot of speculation about an accompanying version

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2009
  이 글은 Internet Explorer 개발 팀 블로그 (영어)의 번역 문서입니다. 이 글에 포함된 정보는 Internet Explorer 개발 팀 블로그 (영어)가 생성된 시점의

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  We’ve made a few improvements to our extensibility model in IE8 RC1 based on feedback we’ve received