debugging css issues for ie 7, 8 and 9

I'm having an issue with ie 7 and 8 where my footer is not rendering right. the only way I'm able to see whats wrong with those browsers is that I'm us开发者_高级运维ing adobe browser lab. not sure what else to do.

Running your page through the W3C validator there are some errors (mostly benign stuff, but there are some improperly closed tags.) Older versions of IE aren't very fault tolerant with improperly closed tags, so I would start by correcting all those issues first.

IE8 and IE9 come with a 'developer tools' feature, which can be accessed via the F12 key. This allows you to debug CSS, as well as other elements of the page. It's not as good as Chrome's dev tools or Firefox's Firebug, but it does help a lot. This tool isn't available in IE7, but it can be used from IE8 running in IE7-compatibility mode (I'd normally recommend avoiding this mode like the plague, but in this circumstance it may be useful).

You can also use a cut-down version of Firebug called Firebug Lite, which can be run as a bookmarklet in any browser, including all versions of IE in current use. This has many good debugging features (although not as good as the full Firebug).