iScroll support on Internet Explorer 7 & IE 8

[Amit Khanna]

Hi there,

Does this awesome scroll lib work with IE7 & IE8.. I personally don’t prefer IE for anything but my site analytic’s shows some IE7 & IE8 viewers as well.

I did some tests but IE8 throws error( Object doesn’t support this property or method Line: 818 Char: 3 Code: 0 ). I did all tests on my desktop.

Thanks for the support,
ak

[vh]

Hi.
It is crucial to support at least IE8. I am also working on a solution. It would be great if we could get some help in that direction.

[Matteo Spinelli]

iScroll was born to fill a hole in mobile browsers support for overflow:scroll. Current desktop compatibility is more of a debug help for developers. I'm still not sold about investing more time on desktop compatibility.

Matteo

[vh]

I understand your point of view. However I am doing web design for quite some time now having customers presenting fashion design and photography. iScroll4 is by far the best script enabling scrolling images and other content accross all browsers not just mobile. Of course I could just figure a different solution for IE8 (I am not supporting any earlier versions) and call it a day, but it would be great if function and design could be consistent on all devices. The resolution of iphone and iPad are sufficiant that I don't have to design a specific site for mobile devices.

[Amit Khanna]

My thoughts are same as vh's. You have such an awesome script, please make it IE8 compatible too and all the functionality which is available to touch devices will also be available to people who still don't use such devices.

Thanks a lot,
ak 

[Samuel Monsarrat]

I for one really have my doubts for several reasons.
iScroll was designed for mobile devices. These have a specific look and feel, a new way of dealing will scrolling. IE8 and 7 are from another age, the age of scrollbars where people expect to see and
use them. I would argue that a lot of IE7 users would be actually lost with a scrollbarless environment. I acknowledge that the "mobile way" of scrolling is coming progressively to the desktop : macOS
Lion, Ubuntu Unity etc, but only in new environments, Mac will not backport their scrollbarless UI to Leopard, it would play havoc with their user-base.
Technically IE7 and even IE8 have terribly slow Javascript engines especially when dealing with and modifying the DOM and they lack any form of hardware acceleration that is necessary to make iScroll
fluid enough to be elegant.

For me, supporting old IE versions will inevitably result in bloat, making the iScroll even heavier, for a result that will most likely be sluggish and functionally misguided.

Samuel.

[DataZombies]

If I were Matteo (and I'm not) I'd say iscroll would support IE as soon as IE fully supports MODERN standards (i.e. ...never).

P.S. IE is irrelevant and quickly becoming extinct. Mobile AND desktop.

[vh]

Great Point and thank you for the insight. Since I am an amateur when it comes to scripting, I am not aware of the technical details. My point of view is purely from a design prospective and in that regard iScroll4 is an absolute perfect function for all environments not just mobile.
IE7 is dead, but I am sorry to say IE8 is still the main browser and that won't change for another year, because the average Windows user doesn't realize that there is something like an update...

[djeglin]

The problem with *not* having support in there for Internet Explorer
is that it means that you are forced in to a situation where you have
to use different scripts across browsers for largely the same
functionality.

Take this as an example:

I am currently working on an application that, for reasons of client
browser support levels, needs to work on mobile Webkit/Safari, as well
as desktop Webkit, Firefox, and IE down to 7 (IE6 is at "completion of
task" level, meaning we can engineer out these kinds of enhancements
for that browser and fall back to overflow: scroll.

The application has been designed in such a way that scrolling areas
can be touch-dragged, or use buttons to "page" the scroller. iScroll
includes support for both these behaviours, however whilst it works
fine on the desktop versions of Webkit and Firefox, it does not work
on IE7 or 8. This now puts me in a position where I must code a
separate script to deal with the desktop paging, when that
functionality is already available within iScroll. It is a needless
expenditure of effort, and a fair amount of unnecessary code, all
because functionality that already exists in a plugin we are using
does not work on Internet Explorer.

Even if the touch scrolling part could fail gracefully and leave the
paging in tact, this would be preferable to where we are at the
moment, where iScroll throws an error on every page it is used on in
IE, so needs to be excluded and replaced. I would have thought that
graceful failure should be a given really, but apparently not.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the stellar work on iScroll, but
I feel that handling incompatible browsers gracefully and falling back
to more basic functionality should be a staple feature in a script
like this.

[Matteo Spinelli]

thanks for your comment. I'm pretty much convinced to make of iScroll an all around scrolling script, this is mostly due to the fragmentation of the mobile market (ie: some support native scrolling, others do not). I believe a solution is needed and IE would be a nice addition.

now the only problem I see is... finding the time ;)

Matteo

[AlanH]

I hacked the August version of iScroll to work in IE8. It seems to still work in other browsers, but I've no idea if it will work in IE7, and I'm sure it would be a disaster in IE6. 

I may update it to the latest version if iScroll, but what I have is working for me right now in a jQuery Mobile web app, and I have other priorities.

I have attached my version. I put the following tag in the HTML <head> to define IE8's compatibility setting: 

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8">

[Corey Dutson]

I've actually done a little work on this myself, and I think I've managed to get most of the basic stuff working in ie. I haven't managed to get the grab scroll action to work, but you can scroll it via external links ( such as with a timeline, next/previous arrows, etc ) and the scrollbars will move. I took on some of Alan H's ideas and expanded them for what I needed. I've tested it down to ie7, so that's something.

This version will compensate for lack of event listeners as well as vendor transforms for the scrollbars. one file that works for all the supported devices as well as the ie family. Not perfect, but it's a start

[Loek Dieben]

Wil this version support scrolling with the mouse scroll wheel for IE7 and above?

if not, is there a option to get this working?

thnx,

Loek

[Greg Baker]

A year or so ago, I hacked v3.6 to work w/ IE.  To get the 'scroll-wheel' working, I used some jQuery 'Scroll Wheel Plugin' - I use jQuery BUT avoid the jQuery Mobile framework.

That said, might I add...  Most people using iScroll in their mobile application developments are making web-apps. That is,  web sites  built with HTML, CSS and Javascript targeting mobile devices.  The key is "Web Sites" - not native nor even hybrid web apps.  So, I would think that the development should also run on IE-whatever with the same look and feel.  Just my opinion.  I understand iScroll's origins and development directions and can not disagree;  I just found that I wanted it to do more, and so hacked it up myself.

I am anxious to look at these two attached mods to a more recent version.

greg

[Alan Hart]

The version I posted handles the scroll wheel in IE 8. I haven't tried it in IE 7, as I think I can 'encourage' any 7 users to upgrade to 8. IE 9 is not often an upgrade option as so many people are still on Windows XP.

If I get some time I'll check out Corey's version.

Alan, from my phone

[Colin]

This works fine for me in IE 8, but I can't get it to work in IE 7.

Why am I worried about IE 7 when only 3.8% of web traffic still uses
it? I'm asking myself the same question...

[toni michel]

I tried in IE7 but won't work for me.. do you have to do anything special but importe the iscrollie.js instead?

[toni michel]

this one even works in IE7 but the problem is that the scrollbar won't follow the scroll (it stays at the top even when you scroll), is that because of CSS3??

[Bilel ZEGHAD]

hello

thanks for your sharing

just for information : 

To have no bug alert to internet explorer 8, i have to change this code : 

Date.now() 

 by

 (new Date()).getTime()