Does IE8 behave differently between different OS versions?

Greetings all.

I'm rolling out a website for a client after having tested it on IE7-IE8 on WinXP (and IE6 on W2K). Strangely, the client is reporting odd behavior from his IE8 browser which I would only开发者_如何学JAVA normally expect from IE6. I am using an HTML5 doctype AND I am using <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> so I would expect IE8 Best Standards behavior, and this is my experience on XP. One clear difference is that the client is using Win7 SP1. Is this a red herring, or do I need to test every operating system too?

What sort of odd behaviour is being reported? You may have issues unrelated to the rendering engine.

The main suspect for me is that Win7 will have different default fonts to WinXP (eg Calibri instead of Ariel), so if you've got a layout which fits perfectly for the XP fonts, you may get some layout gremlins on a platform where those fonts aren't available. Calibri is quite similar to Ariel visually, but does have significantly different metrics, so if your layout is tight, you may find your site suffers from some unexpected word-wrapping or element widths.

This will also be the case in other operating systems that don't supply the default Windows fonts (ie MacOS, Linux, though of course, they won't be using IE).

If this does turn out to be your issue, then in theory you could use the CSS @font-face to get around this problem, by providing a downloadable font for use on your page directly in your stylesheets. Sadly however, although the various browsers in use at the moment all support this feature, they require the fonts to be in a variety of formats, which can make it quite hard to implement in practice.

An easier and more practical solution to the problem would be simply to test with both fonts, and design the page in such a way that it looks okay in either.

In general, it is a good idea to test in all OS/browser combinations that you expect the site to be used with. Tools like IETester are good for testing multiple versions of IE on a single machine. If you can't test all browser/OS combinations yourself, then I would recommend using a service like BrowserShots, which will email you screenshots of your site, as loaded in pretty much every browser and OS you can imagine (and quite a few that you probably can't!).

Hope that helps.