Hi all,
What a surprise - the new version of Internet Explorer, IE9, is more standards compliant than IE8. Unfortunately, this breaks the workarounds for the incompatibilities of IE8, IE7, and IE6 in the menu system we use for Control.com.

What this means is that, for users of IE9, Control.com has no menus. Sorry about that. The workaround is to select "Compatibility View" (it's the broken page icon that appears in the address bar when you have the site up on IE9). This restores Internet Explorer to its previous state of brokenness (for this site only) and allows our menus to work.

In the meantime, we'll be working to upgrade and install a new menu system to set things right. I'll post a message when this is complete so you can turn off Compatibility View.

Users of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Konquerer, etc., etc., can ignore this message -- nothing to see here...

Ken Crater
Nerds in Control LLC

 

I compiled and installed new menus for the Control.com site, and they appear to work in IE9 without resorting to Compatibility View. Drop us a note if you see any "anomalies".

Thanks,
Ken Crater

 

The following isn't a direct reply on this problem, but I thought this was a good lead in to this subject on a more general level. I haven't tested IE9, but there are a lot of web sites that are going to get bit by this one (possibly including some web pages that I wrote). MS IE is a real oddball when it comes to handling web pages, with the added complication of every version of MS IE being different from every other version of MS IE (MS IE6 has a reputation for being particularly bad in that respect). There are even alternate "modes" in MS IE7 and MS IE8 which make it behave in totally different ways depending on which options you have set. The result is that standard web development practice is to create web pages that work with "standards compliant" browsers (basically everything except MS IE), and then come up with a series of hacks to make it work for each version of MS IE.

There are quite a few embedded web servers that are used for configuring or monitoring devices or equipment where this could be a problem. Web browsers report what they are to the web server when they request a web page, and servers often "sniff" the version from this header in order to deliver special page versions for MS IE to provide the version dependent "hacks" (all the other browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. tend to be very compatible with each other and so don't need special treatment).

If the server doesn't know about MS IE9 (which just came out), then it may deliver an MS IE6 (or 7 or 8) specific version, which may not work on MS IE9. It may also deliver a "standards compliant" version of the web page, but MS IE9 isn't *that* standards compliant yet that the page would necessarily work.

I guess the long and the short of it is that people using MS IE9 should expect to have problems on a lot of web sites (including those in embedded devices) for a while and be prepared to use an alternate browser until they are sorted out (or just switch to something else for good, for that matter). The only saving grace is that IE9 seems to be having a relatively slow uptake, particularly in business where the majority of people are still using MS Windows XP (where MS IE9 won't run).