I went and grabbed the IE8 early beta and tried it out in a Vista VM. So far, the out of the box MOSS experience isn’t looking so hot. Of course you could always switch it to IE7 browsing mode and everything looks great. My own MOSS designs look pretty funky as well. Here are some screenshots of IE8 and the out of the box SharePoint UI’s:
UPDATE #4 – Ok, after asking some questions on the IEBlog, I now understand what I was seeing in MOSS. Default.master does indeed render in IE7 mode by default, while Blueband renders in IE8 mode. You can check the render mode easily with this bookmarklet: http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/ie8.asp
UPDATE #3 – This is what I get for posting so early in the beta. Just read the latest post on the IE8 Blog. Based on their description, I think the MOSS ootb default.master would render in IE7 mode by default as it does not have a doctype. This is why it looks normal in IE8 UNLESS you manually force the browser to render in IE8 mode with the Developer Tools… at least this is my latest theory.
UPDATE #2 – Looks like I might have gotten fooled by the IE8 Developer Tools. I was using the Change Compatibility Mode to switch back and forth between IE7 and IE8 rendering. I’m not sure why, but this really messes up my MOSS UI. After closing and opening IE8 the MOSS UI’s look better. Very strange… thanks to Wictor for pointing out the flaws in my screenshots. Maybe I can chalk this up to this being an early beta.
UPDATE – on the Acid Test screenshot. Looks like its a known issue with some of the mirrored Acid Test links, from the IEBlog: “IE8 fails the copies of ACID2 due to the cross domain security checks IE performs for ActiveX controls. Since IE does not natively handle HTML content in the OBJECT tag, but rather uses IE’s rendering engine as an ActiveX to display this HTML content, the same cross domain security checks also apply.”
Default.master:
BlueBand.master:
Manage Web Part Menu:
Admin Menu:
