Internet Explorer and floating comments

[Alex Halavais]

Hi, All,

I've installed Digress.it at http://w1n5t0n.com, an effort to annotate
Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother." The site has already gotten quite a
bit of traffic, helped along by a post on Boing Boing, but I'm hoping
to use it in a class that starts next week.

Unfortunately, it's not really usable in Internet Explorer. I figured
that it was just me, but the same problem appears on the two examples
featured on the site right now (Kindle & Sleepy Hollow). On IE7, the
comments only appear below.

Of course, I recognize IE sucks, but it still represents a large
number of visitors. Has anyone had success in getting digress.it to
work properly in IE?

Thanks,

Alex

[Joss Winn]

It's only compatible with IE8 at the moment. We hope to have it
compatible with IE6 & 7 within the next month. Does anyone have access
to IE6 and is willing to help with regular testing for us? :-)

By the way, if you're getting a lot of traffic or spikes of traffic, I
would highly recommend installing wp-super-cache from the plugin
dashboard. It speeds up page loads noticeably.

Joss

> Thanks,
>
> Alex
>
> >
>

[Alexander Halavais]

Thanks, Joss,

I know how much of a pain IE can be, and especially 6. But it's really
hard to host a site knowing that ~40% of the visitors will be turned
away from it. (For a similar site, I'm at about 18% IE6 and 22% IE7.)
I'll see what I can do in the interim to improve the experience for at
least the 7ers.

Might be good to make this super-clear on the digress.it site. I
probably would have held off on giving this a try if I'd realized it
wasn't cross-browser compatible yet.

I can't volunteer to test on IE6 at the moment--I just don't have a
moment spare. But will get in touch if I can in the coming weeks. I
need to have an install of it running for testing another site.

Best,

Alex

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[Alan Levine]

> It's only compatible with IE8 at the moment. We hope to have it
> compatible with IE6 & 7 within the next month. Does anyone have access
> to IE6 and is willing to help with regular testing for us? :-)

I should be able to... Am setting up the IE Collections app for Vista
which should provide separate apps for all versions of IE through 8 (I
used the older Tredsoft one on XP for version testing).

May the CSS force be with you on solving IE 6 and 7 issues.

[Joss Winn]

Great. Are you happy grabbing the code from svn so it can be tested
before being packaged as a release?

There's nothing new in svn trunk right now, but it could be an easy
way for you to grab code and test on IE6/7 as Eddie is working on it.
He's back from vacation next week so let's see what he thinks.

We should probably focus on this sooner rather.

> >
>

[Alan Levine]

On Aug 26, 12:17 pm, Joss Winn <jossw...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > May the CSS force be with you on solving IE 6 and 7 issues.
>
> Great. Are you happy grabbing the code from svn so it can be tested
> before being packaged as a release?
>
> There's nothing new in svn trunk right now, but it could be an easy
> way for you to grab code and test on IE6/7 as Eddie is working on it.
> He's back from vacation next week so let's see what he thinks.

Yeah I think I can manage it over the weekend- I'll set up a test site
on my domain to test from SVN. Heck, that IE collections has them all,
I can even do IE 1.0 ;-)

[Eddie A. Tejeda]

Hi Alex,

Sorry about the late response. I was on the road the past few days.
But I am working on version 2.4.5 right now which resolves lots of
outstanding issues... especially screen resolution issues.

But on the issue of IE6, here is my breakdown of visitors to digress.it

1. Firefox 55.35%
2. Safari 21.71%
3. Internet Explorer 7.45%
4. Chrome 7.34%
5. Mozilla 5.18%

Then IE is broken down like this:

1. 7.0 45.65%
2. 8.0 42.75%
3. 6.0 11.59%

From my visitors, IE6 represented a smaller segment of visitors,
which gave it less priority during development, but! now that's the
site is spreading IE6 will definitely become a key player.

I think I will focus on more IE6 compatibility this week and release a
new version this weekend. Stay tuned.

--
Eddie A. Tejeda

[Joss Winn]

Just to add to this...

If we want digress.it to be used in the public sector in the UK, we really need to prioritise IE compatibility. It's the default (and often only) browser installed on university and government desktops and we know the sector is interested in digress.it for the discussion of various documents including consultations.

Joss

[Roger Sperberg]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Eddie A. Tejeda wrote:

But on the issue of IE6, here is my breakdown of visitors to digress.it

1. Firefox 55.35%
2. Safari 21.71%
3. Internet Explorer 7.45%
4. Chrome 7.34%
5. Mozilla 5.18%

Then IE is broken down like this:

1. 7.0 45.65%
2. 8.0 42.75%
3. 6.0 11.59%

From my visitors, IE6 represented a smaller segment of visitors,

which gave it less priority during development, but now that the

site is spreading IE6 will definitely become a key player.

I would think that visitors to the digress.it site are looking into using its comments-side-by-side-with-the-text feature on their own websites.

And if they're IE7 or IE6 users, they haven't seen this on any sites they've visited because their browser doesn't show it. So they don't even know there's something to look into.

So it should be no surprise that digress.it's <IE8 percentage is so low.

Roger

--
Roger Sperberg

rsperberg at gmail.com
roger.s at spress.ws
twitter: @RogerSPress

[Roger Sperberg]

My installation isn't open-to-the-public yet so my digress.it testing has been ultra-minimal: one post that has one comment.

However, I wanted to report that Safari on the Mac saw the comment at the bottom of the page, as did Google Chrome on WinXP.

Firefox on the Mac and Firefox 3.5, Opera 9.64 and IE8 on WinXP do position the comments correctly.

I haven't tested Safari on WinXP or earlier versions of IE.

Roger

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Eddie A. Tejeda <eddie....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Alex,

...

But on the issue of IE6, here is my breakdown of visitors to digress.it

1. Firefox 55.35%
2. Safari 21.71%
3. Internet Explorer 7.45%
4. Chrome 7.34%
5. Mozilla 5.18%

Then IE is broken down like this:

1. 7.0 45.65%
2. 8.0 42.75%
3. 6.0 11.59%

 From my visitors, IE6 represented a smaller segment of visitors,
which gave it less priority during development, but! now that's the
site is spreading IE6 will definitely become a key player.

I think I will focus on more IE6 compatibility this week and release a
new version this weekend.  Stay tuned.

--
Eddie A. Tejeda

--
Roger Sperberg

rsperberg at gmail.com
roger.s at spress.ws
twitter: @RogerSPress

n900guide.com

[Joss Winn]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Roger Sperberg <rspe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My installation isn't open-to-the-public yet so my digress.it testing has
> been ultra-minimal: one post that has one comment.
>
> However, I wanted to report that Safari on the Mac saw the comment at the
> bottom of the page, as did Google Chrome on WinXP.
>
> Firefox on the Mac and Firefox 3.5, Opera 9.64 and IE8 on WinXP do position
> the comments correctly.
>
> I haven't tested Safari on WinXP or earlier versions of IE.
>

Thanks, Roger. I occasionally see this but have found that it is
caused either by a slow response from the server or another plugin
that is in use that is not loading fast enough (i.e. Google
Analytics). In turn, this interferes with digress.it loading properly.
(Eddie, is the digress.it jscript being loaded at the top (early) or
the bottom (later) of the page?)

Safari and Chrome both use webkit to render pages (they are
effectively the same browser engine) and so it looks like an issue
with webkit, specifically.

Maybe Eddie has some ideas. I have just looked at my digress.it site
(http://tait.josswinn.org) in Chrome and it is rendering without any
problems. Are you experiencing problems when viewing my site with
Chrome/Safari?

Cheers
Joss

[Roger Sperberg]

Your site looks fine when I visit it in Chrome, but mine doesn't.

I'm going out of town till next week, so I won't be reporting in again till then.

Roger

--
Roger Sperberg
27 Aubrey Rd
Montclair, NJ 07043-2201
973-200-4224 rings all numbers
--

[Eddie A. Tejeda]

Have a look now. It works on IE7/8 and loads on IE6, some of the
interactions are still wonky. You should upgrade your site and let me
know how it works out.

--
Eddie A. Tejeda