[Oct 6, 2009 Update: IE8 is certified with EBS 11i; see this article.]
[Sept 11, 2009 Update: IE8 is certified with EBS 12; see this article]
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 on March 19, 2009. Reviews about IE 8 are sprouting across the web like flowers after a spring shower. It is inevitable that some of your E-Business Suite users are going to be tempted into upgrading their
desktops to this latest browser.
Our testing with IE 8 is still underway. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the OA Framework (a.k.a. HTML or Self-Service Web Applications) E-Business Suite products seem to work fine with IE 8.
The bad news is that we’ve identified issues launching Forms-based (a.k.a. Professional interface) EBS products using IE 8. These issues exist for both Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12.
Blocking IE 8 Rollouts to EBS Users
It is imperative that your Apps users stay on IE7 until we complete our certification of IE8 with the E-Business Suite.
Microsoft released the IE8 Blocker Toolkit available to desktop administrators. The IE8 Blocker Toolkit allows desktop administrators to prevent end-users from being automatically upgraded to IE8. For full details, see:
- IE8 Blocker Toolkit Available Today! (Microsoft website)
We recommend that you deploy this as soon as possible, to prevent your EBS users from inadvertently (or deliberately) upgrading to IE 8.
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 attempt to access the E-Business Suite, you will experience issues launching Forms-based EBS products with IE8.
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.
Outlook for IE8 + E-Business Suite Certification
Our Development teams are working on resolving the issues with launching EBS Forms-based content in IE 8. It’s critical that we fix this, but that’s not the only thing that needs to be done as part this certification.
Perhaps more importantly, our extensive set of automated regression tests for the E-Business Suite are built with HP Mercury WinRunner. WinRunner is not compatible with IE8. This means that all of our E-Business Suite products need to be tested with IE 8
manually, instead of with our automated testing tools. These manual tests will take more time to complete, naturally.
I don’t have firm schedules for our IE8 certification yet. 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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