Kiosk, IE8 and CSS support

[DrBB]

Kind of a basic architecture question here. Kiosk is used to "lock down" the browser on the resident machine, but it's not acting as a browser in its own right, is that correct?

The context for my question is that I'm developing an application with an advanced CSS technique that doesn't work in all browsers, including IE6 and earlier, but should work in IE8. So if I'm running Kiosk "under" (or "over"?) IE8 there shouldn't be any issues about my CSS rendering correctly, as long as it does so in the non-Kiosk environment--is that correct? It locks people out from linking to other sites etc., but it's transparent to the native browser's rendering engine?

[awarnick]

I think the confusion here is coming from the fact that Microsoft decided to always run the IE browser control in IE 7 mode by default, even when IE is set to render pages in IE 8 mode. Our very soon to be released version of KioWare will have an easy way in the Config Tool to change the rendering mode to IE 8. Until then, there are at least two way to do this yourself:

Microsoft has some things you can do to specify that you want rendering to be done in IE 8 mode for the browser control:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx?ppud=4

You can put this in the header of your pages:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" >
to make them always render in IE 8 mode.

If you don't want to modify your pages, see this near the bottom of the page:

"By default, applications hosting the WebBrowser Control <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29.aspx> open standards-based pages in IE7 mode unless the page contains an appropriate X-UA-Compatible header. You can change this by adding the name of the application executable file to the FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION feature control key and setting the value accordingly."

[DrBB]

Thanks, that helps. Fortunately this will be a "captive" website, meant only to be accessible via the Kiosk touchscreen, so I can add the metatag without worrying about how other browsers will react.