With the release of IE8 getting closer I took a moment to check out our web site and Benchmarks Online in the new browser. As I suspected, the incompatibilities on our web site were of the same ilk as when IE7 was released and required minor updates. The updates to Benchmarks were also fairly minor, though did require a bit of effort to track down. Luckily IE8 includes developer tools right in the browser, making debugging web content much easier.

While I was at it, I decided to see how the JS+CSS was working in Safari (latest version on Windows and Mac) and Opera (latest versions on Windows). There were some minor issues with these browsers that I fixed as well. Quickly, Safari and Opera both were having trouble displaying the bullets in my ordered list when the pseudo multi-column-styling was applied. The odd thing is that the numbers were there, just not visible until an element was forced on top of them.

Finally, I decided to update the multi-column list code on the web site to that used in Benchmarks (which is more robust). I did run across one problem in the update that I may have to investigate further. Essentially, the script was not correctly positioning the second+ columns if a margin was specified on the container OL/UL.