Member Avatar for Patrick Thomas

I have a wierd link issue with Internet Explorer 8 concerning links on my front page at http://www.b2bfax.net There are two links that direct to our prices page and they work fine in Firefox but don't work at all in IE. I have an additional link that links to merge samples on pane three and that works in both browsers. I tried removing all the css for the nonworking links, re-entering them in Dreamweaver but i can not figure out why they don't work in IE8.

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Dani AI

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Brief diagnostic note: the links were being blocked by an overlapping, positioned slide that intercepted pointer events — a subtle cross‑browser stacking/hit‑testing difference between IE8 and Firefox. Firefox let the anchors receive clicks while IE8 treated the positioned sibling as a cover, so the links showed and loaded fine when pasted into the address bar but were not clickable in the page.

Technical context: any element with position (relative/absolute) can form a stacking context; even a visually transparent sibling placed above a link will capture mouse events in older IE. IE8 does not support pointer-events on HTML elements and has slightly different stacking rules, so an element that appears “behind” in one browser can still block clicks in another unless z-index/positioning are explicitly controlled.

Useful checks and quick fixes:

  1. Inspect computed position and z-index with IE8 Developer Tools (F12) to see which element bounds cover the link.
  2. Temporarily give suspected overlays a visible background or outline to reveal hidden covers.
  3. Remove unnecessary positioning from non‑interactive panes, or explicitly raise the clickable pane’s stacking order by assigning a higher z-index to its positioned ancestor.
  4. Test keyboard focus (Tab): a link that can be focused but not clicked is being blocked by an overlay.
  5. Centralize slide stacking logic in CSS classes (avoid inconsistent inline styles) to prevent one pane accidentally covering another.
  6. Remember that pointer-events is not a reliable fallback in IE8.

This thread’s diagnosis came from (styling/z‑index differences) and the problem was resolved after removed the offending position rule; ’s suggestions (case/www) were a good sanity check but not the root cause. For legacy IE support, the checks above are the most reliable way to find invisible overlays that intercept clicks.

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Member Avatar for almostbob

get rid of any mixed cases.
uri normally lower case,
B2Bpage is not equal to b2bpage on the server, but it is on localhost
ie is expecting the standard (lower case letters) and converting the uri to lowercase
firefox is smarter and handles uri as entered

IE is still >= 70% of users

Have to support it

Member Avatar for Patrick Thomas

Thanks for the Reply almostbob and i tried all lowercase but it didn't help. I have a link on pane 3 that has mixed case that does work in IE. IE doesn't even recognize the linke, no pointer when i hover over and nothing happens on the click. I did paste in the url target of the link into IE8 and it loads fine. It's like IE8 doesn't think that is a link for some reason. Thanks again and please let me know if you have any other ideas.

Member Avatar for Taywin

Have you tried adding 'www.' in front of your domain name? It happened to me with some browser in the past. Not sure IE8 requires 'www.' in order to recognize it as a URL.

Edited by Taywin
Member Avatar for Patrick Thomas

Thanks for the reply and Yes, tried adding the 'www' first thing but it didn't help. It's the wierdest thing, i have links on pane three that do work.

Member Avatar for almostbob

slide0 hgas different styling than applied to slide 2 3 4
Try <div id='slide0' with the styling attributes of the slides that do work

<div id="slide0" style="float:left; width:100%; height:500px; ">

compared to

<div id="slide1" style="float:left; width:100%; height:500px; background:#444444; padding:10px; border-top-left-radius:5px; border-top-right-radius:5px;5px; border-bottom-right-radius:5px;5px; border-bottom-left-radius:5px; box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888888; position:relative; z-index:1;">

z-index default is 0 :: slide0 may be behind the other slides in IE8's opinion so the links unclickable.

Edited by almostbob
commented: Solved by Almostbob +0
Member Avatar for Patrick Thomas

Thanks much!!! It was the position: relative; but you surley figured this out noticing the style diffs. It is fixed now thanks to you.

commented: Glad to help, IE not the smartest b rowser, Kudos you solved it yourself +13
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