tags:

views:

495

answers:

3
+2  Q: 

Troubleshooting Help With IE8/Superfish Problem on SOME Computers Only

Our website uses the superfish jQuery plug-in for our menus (http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/), and they work fine in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, Chrome, etc. ... and even in MOST IE8 installations. The problem is, in some IE8 installations, the menus don't work (they highlight on mouseover but don't drop-down the menu).

This has me baffled. In addition to a couple customer complaints, I've got one (Windows XP) machine in-house that reproduces the issue. However, I also have another Win XP/IE8 machine in-house which doesn't experience the problem. I'm used to dealing with JS/CSS issues between different browsers, but this issue between two machines on the exact same OS and browser is a bit much.

Oh, and just to further obfuscate the matter, the machine that is reproducing the issue shows no errors, Javascript or otherwise (even when I go in to developer mode). So ... does anyone have any suggestions on what could be going on?

As far as I know neither of my two "test" machines have any special plug-ins or anything which would cause the problem, they're identical in terms of everything that matters, and there's no JS error occurring that I can check the stacktrace of or anything. But this isn't just some crazy problem that's unique to my test machine, because as I said some customers have reported it too.

Any help would be appreciated.

A: 

Can you try setting the IE7 compatibility mode and see whether the problem persists? 

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

(into the head of the document, best would be directly after <head>)

If it works then, you'll definitely know that it is some IE8 specific rendering issue. My first bet would be that your menu uses CSS hacks to set certain IE specific settings, unaware that IE 8 (fortunately) behaves differently and more standards-compatibly than its predecessors. If that is the case, you would have to use an IE8 specific CSS hack (or, better, specific style sheet) to "re-fix" those settings.

But first, check whether this really is the problem using the compatibility view.

Pekka  2010-01-25 19:25:18
Tried this, but unfortunately it didn't help :-(
machineghost  2010-01-25 23:31:14
Really odd. Are there any notable patterns with the machines it doesn't work with? 1. Screen resolution 2. Font size (dpi) 3. Javascript deactivated... If you can't find anything, you'll have to start debugging the JS in detail (e.g. adding alert()s to the various stages of highlighting and displaying the menu to see what gets executed and what doesn't) or change menus.
Pekka  2010-01-25 23:56:38
A: 

Try clearing Internet Explorers cache. Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Browsing History section -> Delete ... -> Temporary Internet Files -> Delete.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I've seen all IE versions start behaving strangely when the cache has been full or not cleared for a long time.

hova  2010-01-25 19:38:36
Tried this as well, but it didn't work either :-(
machineghost  2010-01-25 23:31:41
A: 

Try turning off compatibility view: Tools -> Compatibility View -> Uncheck. I too struggled with this for the better part of an afternoon until I just tried this on a whim and it worked!

Jeff Denton  2010-05-11 23:35:18
That didn't reproduce the issue either, but thanks for the idea.
machineghost  2010-05-19 16:49:59

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