Linking to individual tabs on tabbed content pages

We've recently made some changes to how our tabbed content templates work in the CMS, so it's now possible to link directly to an individual tab, whether that's the careers tab on a course page or the publications tab on a staff profile.

This change also means that as you navigate through multiple tabs on a page, pressing the back button in your browser will now take you to the previous tab you were viewing, rather than the previous page.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.