[Oct 6, 2009 Update: IE is certified with EBS 11i; see this article.]
[Sept 11, 2009 Update: IE8 is certified with EBS 12; see this article]
As of today, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is still not certified with either Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i or 12. Our standing recommendation is that your desktop administrators use Microsoft’s IE8 Blocker Toolkit to prevent your end-users from
inadvertently upgrading to IE8. For full details about this toolkit, see:
- IE8 Blocker Toolkit Available Today! (Microsoft website)
We recommend that you deploy this as soon as possible, to prevent your EBS users from accidentally upgrading their desktops to IE 8.
What’s Holding Up this EBS Certification?
If you recall from our previous updates, the way that we currently launch Forms-based EBS products is not workable in IE8. We need to do the following things before IE8 can be considered certified with the respective E-Business Suite releases:
Rework the Forms launching code in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i
Manually test all Apps 11i products with IE8
Rework the Forms launching code in Apps 12
Manually test all Apps 12 products with IE8
Remember also that IE8 is not compatible with HP Mercury WinRunner, our current automated regression testing software. This means that all of the tests that would ordinarily be tested via our automated testing process need to be done by hand.
This is time-consuming and rather painful.
What If You Upgrade to IE 8 Before It’s Certified With Apps?
If you don’t need to access Apps 11i or 12, there won’t be any problems with upgrading to IE 8.
If you access only the web-based, Self-Service, OA Framework based content, there shouldn’t be any notable issues. HTML-based E-Business Suite screens should theoretically work with no issues in IE8, although we haven’t formally certified all of them
yet.
If you attempt to access the E-Business Suite for Oracle Forms-based content (i.e. the Professional User Interface):
You will experience issues launching Forms-based EBS Release 12 products with IE8.
You may experience some odd issues launching Forms-based EBS Release 11i products with IE8. Forms may work sporadically and may generate sporadic issues.
For now, Oracle Support engineers will try to reproduce any reported IE compatibility issues with IE 7, not IE 8. If issues can be reproduced with IE 7, then Oracle Support will provide a workaround or log a bug, as appropriate.
If you experience issues that can only be reproduced on IE8, you will be advised to downgrade your browser to IE7 if you need to access the E-Business Suite.
When Will This Be Certified?
As I’ve noted before, I’m not permitted to discuss specific schedules. That said, looking at the outstanding tasks I’ve listed above, you might not be surprised to
hear that this certification may take a while to complete.
The majority of this work was queued up behind our Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 release. Now that Apps 12.1.1 is out the door, we’re
turning our attention to other big projects, including the IE8 compatibility rework.
You’re welcome to monitor or subscribe to this blog for updates, which I’ll post as soon as soon as they’re available.
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