I went to work today (looking at the time it’s almost yesterday) and dropped off some photocopy jobs for next week and decided to boot up my work computer to see how the site’s new layout looks. Everything went fine until I checked the podcast page and clicked on a Flash link. Ah. All the computers at work have Internet Explorer 8 installed.

Wonderful.

When I got home, I booted up Windows 7 and run IE (I have v9). I know I can go into Developer Tools and toggle the browser to act like v8 which I do. And then I load one of the Flash podcasts just to make sure it doesn’t work and, by golly, it doesn’t. I then toggle it back into v9 mode and the podcast immediately loads. And then I toggle it into v7 mode just for grins and the podcast doesn’t load.

Wonderful. I know I’m repeating myself.

I’m going to have to think about doing browser detection for the Flash podcasts and probably load a QuickTime version of it, instead. I’m not happy about that because I was trying to get away from doing browser detection. I started doing that years ago when I was writing the JavaScript-based quizzes and it drove me crazy.

OK. Crazier.

<updated added>

I've found a temporary solution for the Flash problem in IE v7 and 8. Instead of clicking on the Flash link, , click on this link, , instead. Since neither v7 nor v8 of Internet Explorer is HTML5 compatible, this link will default to using QuickTime to show the video file. Yes, this assumes you have QuickTime installed.

I think I’ll need to check for IE on the Flash page and include a link to a different file if it doesn’t work properly.