I have to admit, that prior to writing this e–mail, the only experience I have with Internet Explorer (IE) 8, is from a development stand point ensuring cross browser compliance.

This weekend I have been staying at a local hotel in Las Vegas working on a new venture specializing in search technology. Yes, I do have a home here, but with the constant distractions of family, friends, and employees, I needed to get away so that I could focus. While at the hotel, I received two e-mails asking why the FindAnyFloor.com character, who is still nameless, was now a Smurf.

What in the world were they talking about? Had they been partying too much on a three day weekend and now seeing everything in shades of blue. I broke my rule of not working on FindAnyFloor.com for a few days, and quickly logged on to check the site. Our mascot was fine and the colors in his face were normal. Of course it was normal for me, I am using FireFox, as I have given up on IE a long time ago. Seeing that I am on my new Mac, I checked Safari, and everything looked fine in that browser as well.

Next, I logged into the VPN at our offices in Las Vegas and Georgia so that I could use Internet Explorer. Again, everything was fine. I decided to call one of them up and quickly discovered they were using IE 8 and so I asked them to use FireFox. When they checked it in FF3, everything was fine. I quickly called the second person, and they were also on IE 8. I had them also check in FireFox and once again, everything was fine.

I went to the extreme of having one of them uninstall IE 8 and revert back to IE 7 (sounds very reminiscent of the roll back from Vista to XP). As soon as they were back on IE 7, everything was back to normal. The moral of this story is that we obviously need to check a few settings to ensure that we are indeed cross browser compliant with IE 8, and maybe everyone should wait until IE 8 matures a little before updating their system. My guess is that IE 8 will have a lot of people seeing blue, or in reality seeing RED!