What version of IE is the overlay?

[Pc_Madness]

Windows 7 RC 64bit with IE 8 installed, visiting my site via the overlay reports the user agent as,
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Valve Steam GameOverlay; ) ", yet its rendering like IE 7.

Screenshot of overlay: http://www.phillipmccallum.com/projects/tf2stats2/ie.png
Page in question: http://www.phillipmccallum.com/projects/tf2stats2/id/pcmadness/ (its not finished so leave it alone :p)

So, whats the dealio? :) It works fine in IE 8 outside of Steam.

And while I'm here, whats the % of Steam users with IE 7 compared to 8? I took one look at my site in IE 7 and was like "PASS!", but perhaps I'll need to rethink if the % is high enough. Unfortunately the stats aren't included in the Steam Hardware survey so I can't check.


Also, I'm not sure if this is such a good idea or not, but could we get the SteamID of the user added to the User Agent? That way I could send them straight to their stats instead of them fumbling around trying to find it.

Cheers. :)

[AntiFritz]

Overlay doesnt use ie it uses trident. Big difference.

[Pc_Madness]

Overlay doesnt use ie it uses trident. Big difference.

You know what I mean. :p Trident == IE. Seems its pulling the IE version incorrectly then if its using the IE 7 libraries (can Valve install the IE 8 version of MSHTML or not going to happen?)

[Mangr0v3]

Steam uses the same 'IE' version that you have installed.

[Pc_Madness]

Steam uses the same 'IE' version that you have installed.

I thought that as well, but a lovely article on Slashdot about Dynamic linking of DLL files got me thinking that Valve are probably linking to the IE 7 version of MSHTML.dll, so it can't just dynamically change to the 8 version without a recompile on Valves part, since Windows keeps multiple version of it for compatibility reasons.

Of course, I didn't read the article very thoroughly, so I may be very wrong. :p

[Mangr0v3]

Running it on Vista with IE8, XP SP3 with IE8, and 7 RC with IE8 beta, each time Steam used the IE8 version of Trident.

[Pc_Madness]

Running it on Vista with IE8, XP SP3 with IE8, and 7 RC with IE8 beta, each time Steam used the IE8 version of Trident.

Are you sure though? Would you mind confirming? I've asked 3 different people and they're all experiencing the same as me, claims to be 8 but rendering as 7.

[Ath]

The default version of Trident included in Windows 7 is always Trident 4.0 (Due to IE8's inclusion), which supports HTML4 and CSS2.1 to standards.

However the component aka mshtml.dll has compatability and quirks rendering modes (IE7/IE6 respectively). As the Steam overlay only uses the Trident component (To render content, it doesn't hook IE) they've forced it to render in compat mode in absence of the Compat-View switcher that IE8 has.

They've most likely done so as not to either break websites that sniff for IE in the useragent (Steam community being one) and apply non-standard CSS hacks, or if they've just simply not updated the Steam Browser to use Trident 4.

You can verify this by taking the Acid2 Test:
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html

Edit: I will add that people need to know there is a distinction between Trident (mshtml.dll) and IE. IE uses Trident, but Trident is NOT IE.

[Pc_Madness]

they've forced it to render in compat mode in absence of the Compat-View switcher that IE8 has.


I thought that as well, but at least with IE 8, it changes the user agent to IE 7 instead when in compatibility mode, thats not happening here. Unless Valve have forgotten to change the user agent to 7 when they forced compatibility mode.

[ReBoot]

IE's HTML renderer defaults to IE7 when it'S embedded in another application.