Testing out the IE Update

 
Apr 05, 2006
by Judith Dinowitz

In all of the noise about the IE update, Sean Corfield and Geoff Gaudreault stand out as bloggers who have tested the update and reported on their experiences. I thought a summary of their tests would be of interest to our readers.

Sean tested the update by visiting sites with Flash content, such as Matt Woodward's "Flex your CF muscles" Macrochat and some sites that used CFForm and CFChart. The update seemed to do what it was supposed to with no glitches; what I found interesting was his experience when he went to a site with a Flash form generated by ColdFusion 7. He writes:

"Interestingly, activating the 'control' caused the page to scroll up so the form was centered on the page (vertically) which actually made it easier to interact with the form (half of it was below the 'fold' when I first loaded the page)."

So the question I had was: Was the vertical centering due to the IE update, or was that behavior part of the ActiveX control that had not loaded yet? Does the update give us more functionality than Microsoft's circumvention of the Eolas patent? This may bear investigating.

Sean said that people are making a big deal out of something that is really not so terrible. As he comments in his blog entry, "The vast majority of users already tend to click repeatedly when trying to fill in forms so they're just not going to notice the change in behavior caused by the IE Update."

After installing the update, Geoff Gaudreault also reported that it did not break his Flash applications. It simply forced the user to click in order to interact with them. His interesting contribution to this discussion is his second blog entry, "The Fix for the Patch? I say NO!", Geoff noted that the proposed JavaScript "fix" for the update was bad form.

"It feels hacky. It relies on the user having JavaScript turned on, and makes pages more kludgy and slow. Since it uses doc.write, it is invisible to search engines. Sure, Google has trouble reading Flash, but eventually it will be able to. If everyone's using document.write to push their Flash onto the page, search engines will never find it."

Geoff did not like the added complexity of the JavaScript, and also said that this feels like we're going back to the 1990's, when we would code for specific browsers.

In the comments on Geoff's second blog entry, one user who had tested the JavaScript suggested using FlashObject (a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content), which would also circumvent the IE update problem.

So -- Do you fix your sites with JavaScript, or do you simply accept that this is the way Internet Explorer works (for now)? The answer really depends on you. But the first step is to download the update on one of your machines and test it. See how you like the experience. Write a version of the JavaScript fix for your site and test that. And then make a decision.

It's that simple.

IE Update and ColdFusion MX 7 (Corfield.org, April 4, 2006)

My Experience with the Patch (Neurofuzzy, March 4, 2006)

The Fix for the Patch? I say NO! (Neurofuzzy, March 9, 2006)
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