Rgba Background with Ie Filter Alternative: IE9 Renders Both!

rgba background with IE filter alternative: IE9 renders both!

I’ve come up with a hacky workaround that I thought I'd share.

IE9 and above supports the :not() CSS pseudo selector. By using an attribute that doesn’t exist on an element we can get IE9 to disable it's filter gradient:

div {
    width: 200px;
    height: 200px;

    /* For FF, Chome, Opera, IE9+ */
    background: rgba(0,0,255,0.5);

    /* For IE6-9 */
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#7FFF0000,endColorstr=#7FFF0000);
}

div:not([dummy]) {
    /* IE9 only */
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(enabled='false');
}

I ended up using this because my transparent div only features once. It also seemed a little neater keeping things to CSS, rather than using conditional comments in the HTML.

Edit: In support of other answers, I found this article from the Microsoft dev team encouraging developers to use conditional comments, not CSS workarounds like mine.

IE9, IE10 double dipping CSS opacity/filter

You can place the filter in a seperate stylesheet and used conditional statements for it

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
    <link href="lowie-versions.css" rel="Stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->

I personally find these pretty hacky but sometimes you just need them

Transparent background rendering White in Internet Explorer

UPDATE
The Jquery Cycle Plugin will add a background colour to elements in older versions of IE.

You need to set the cleartypeNoBg option to true in your Cycle initialisation.

$("#image-content-panel").cycle({
    fx : 'scrollRight',
    speed : 2700,
    cleartypeNoBg: true 
});

EDIT The below is not relevent

IE8 doesn't support rgba values and will fallback to a solid colour. If you don't define a fallback it will default to white which is what you are seeing.

There's a couple of ways to handle this.

1. Accept IE8's limitations.

    #header {
        z-index: 100 !important;
        width: 100%;
        height: 50px;
        background: rgb(0,0,0);
        background: rgba(0,0,0,0.6);
        margin: 10px 0 0 0;
    }

#header will have a solid black background in browsers that don;t support rgba. Semi opaque in browsers that do.

2.Use a filter

    #header {
        z-index: 100 !important;
        width: 100%;
        height: 50px;
        background: rgba(0,0,0,0.6);
        -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#99000000, endColorstr=#99000000)"
        margin: 10px 0 0 0;
    }

#header will have 60% transparent black background in IE8 and proper browsers. Personally, I hate using filters. They make your markup hideous and are difficult to maintain unless you are excellent at converting rgb to hex codes in your head (which I'm not). Also, this particular filter is IE8+. It will not work in IE7, though there are other filters that will work in IE6-7. You should also probably separate this out in to an IE8 specific stylesheet or use some other method to prevent IE9 from using the filter as IE9 supports rgba.

3.Use a 1px x 1px black, semi-transparent .png

    #header {
        z-index: 100 !important;
        width: 100%;
        height: 50px;
        background: url(background.png) repeat;
        margin: 10px 0 0 0;
    }

This is the route I usually go down simply because it's simple. It takes seconds to create a .png if you need to change the alpha and you don't need to worry about browser inconsistencies.

css opacity not working in IE

opacity does not work on pseudo objects in IE 10,9,8

Try this code:

HTML:

<div></div>

CSS:

div{
  width:100px;
  height: 100px;
  background: blue;

  filter:alpha(opacity=30);
  -moz-opacity:0.3;
  -khtml-opacity: 0.3;
  opacity: 0.3;
}

div:after{
    content: ' ';
    position: absolute;
    width:100px;
    height: 100px;
    left: 200px;
    background: blue;

    filter:alpha(opacity=30);
    -moz-opacity:0.3;
    -khtml-opacity: 0.3;
    opacity: 0.3;
}

Click to see it in action

What you're supposed to see is two squares both semi transparant. However IE disregards the opacity properties for the pseudo item, and it renders it completely opaqe.

Gradients in Internet Explorer 9

You still need to use their proprietary filters as of IE9 beta 1.

box-shadow and IE9 compatibilty

The CSS3 box-shadow is a Candidate Recommendation.

It is method of displaying an inner or outer shadow effect to elements and it can be partially emulated in older IE versions using the non-standard shadow filter. Partial support in Safari, iOS Safari and Android Browser refers to missing inset and blur radius value support.

IE9 has no problem showing box-shadow except when shadowing a box within a table-cell (If the CSS of the table has its border-collapse property set to collapse, then the box-shadow is not applied. This is fixed in a future releases).

As mentioned earlier, IE6-8 requires Visual Filters to emulate CSS3 box-shadows without JavaScript. In order to illustrate this, I will show several different types of box-shadows below and show both the CSS3 syntax and the equivalent Visual Filter CSS recipe. Some of these recipes produce almost identical results, while others are rough equivalents.

Note that all these examples use a variation of Paul Irish’s Conditional CSS Pattern in order to create the IE-only rules. This involves replacing the <body> tag of the document with this HTML:

<!-- Extra white-space below is just to make it easier to read. :-) -->

   <!--[if lt IE 7 ]>   <body class="ie6">          <![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 7 ]>      <body class="ie7">          <![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 8 ]>      <body class="ie8">          <![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 9 ]>      <body class="ie9">          <![endif]-->
   <!--[if (gt IE 9) ]> <body class="modern">       <![endif]-->
   <!--[!(IE)]><!-->    <body class="notIE modern"> <!--<![endif]-->

We can then apply CSS specific to a version of IE. For example:

body.ie7 #box {
   /* insert IE7 specific CSS here */
}

(Note: Paul Irish’s technique officially has the conditional comments around the html tag, not the body tag. You can use either for these techniques to work. I just prefer using the latter.)

All these Visual Filter recipes depend on the box “having layout”. If you have any difficulty with the Visual Filters activating, set zoom: 1 or a static width inside the IE6-8 specific CSS to force the block to have layout.

Type #1: Simple, Unblurred Shadows

In order to simulate simple, un-blurred box-shadows in IE, we use IE’s DropShadow Visual filter:

#box {
  /* CSS for all browsers. */
  border: solid 1px #808080;
  background: #ffffcc;
  margin: 10px;
  padding: 10px;

  /* CSS3 Box-shadow code: */
  box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
  -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
  -moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
}

/* IE6-8 Specific Code */
body.ie6 #box,
body.ie7 #box,
body.ie8 #box {
   zoom: 1;
   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(OffX=5, OffY=5, Color=#ff0000);
}

There are two exceptions to this solution. The first deals with when the block has a transparent background, and the other has to do with negative box-shadow offsets.

Type #1a: Blocks With Transparent Backgrounds

Let’s say you use the above CSS, but omit the background property:

#box {
  /* CSS for all browsers.  Note there is no background-color, so box will be transparent */
  border: solid 1px #808080;
  margin: 10px;
  padding: 10px;

  /* CSS3 Box-shadow code: */
  box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
  -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
  -moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 0px #ff0000;
}

/* IE6-8 Specific Code */
body.ie6 #box,
body.ie7 #box,
body.ie8 #box {
   zoom: 1;
   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(OffX=5, OffY=5, Color=#ff0000);
}

Doing this will results in some unexpected results in IE6-8. The results in IE7 are as hideous and unreadable as the average YTMND page! In order to fix this issue in elderly IE, one must add a background color in IE6-8 only and remove it with the Chroma filter.

Note: All the other types of box-shadow recipes that follow should also use this Chroma filter method when it is desirable to have a transparent background in the box itself.

Type 1b: Negative Shadow Offsets

If there are negative shadow offsets, you will see a small difference with the position of the box being shadowed:

#box {
  /* CSS for all browsers. */
  border: solid 1px #808080;
  background: #ffffcc;
  margin: 10px;
  padding: 10px;

  /* CSS3 Box-shadow code: */
  box-shadow: -10px -5px 0px #ff0000;
  -webkit-box-shadow: -10px -5px 0px #ff0000;
  -moz-box-shadow: -10px -5px 0px #ff0000;
}

/* IE6-8 Specific Code */
body.ie6 #box,
body.ie7 #box,
body.ie8 #box {
   zoom: 1;
   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(OffX=-10, OffY=-5, Color=#ff0000);
}

Type #2: Glowing box-shadow

The second box-shadow I use a lot is what I call the “glowing box” effect. This happens when a shadow with a large blur radius is put directly behind a box (i.e. the x- and y-offsets are set to 0, and the blur-radius is a non-zero number). It is possible to simulate this effect in IE using the Shadow filter. This filter must be applied four times (north, south, east and west of the box) in order to simulate the CSS3 effect. Here is the CSS recipe:

#box {
   box-shadow: 0 0 5px #666666;
   -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 5px #666666;
   -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 5px #666666;
}   

body.ie6 #box,
body.ie7 #box,
body.ie8 #box {
   zoom: 1;
   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Color=#cccccc, Strength=5, Direction=0),
         progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Color=#cccccc, Strength=5, Direction=90),
         progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Color=#cccccc, Strength=5, Direction=180),
         progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Color=#cccccc, Strength=5, Direction=270);
}

Two important caveats about the Visual Filter rules:

As mentioned before, the CSS for IE6-8 uses a lighter color for the shadow. This is due to the way the Shadow filter behaves: it requires a lighter shade to simulate the same effect.
Also he Visual Filters examples are pushed down and to the right compared to the CSS3 example. This is for the same reasons as stated in Type 1b, and a developer would again have to use margins or positioning to get the box in exactly the same place as it is in IE6-8.

Overlay a background-image with an rgba background-color

The solution by PeterVR has the disadvantage that the additional color displays on top of the entire HTML block - meaning that it also shows up on top of div content, not just on top of the background image. This is fine if your div is empty, but if it is not using a linear gradient might be a better solution:

<div class="the-div">Red text</div>

<style type="text/css">
  .the-div
  {
    background-image: url("the-image.png");
    color: #f00;
    margin: 10px;
    width: 200px;
    height: 80px;
  }
  .the-div:hover
  {
    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("the-image.png");
    background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("the-image.png");
    background-image: -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("the-image.png");
    background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("the-image.png");
    background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), to(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1))), url("the-image.png");
    background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("the-image.png");
  }
</style>

See fiddle. Too bad that gradient specifications are currently a mess. See compatibility table, the code above should work in any browser with a noteworthy market share - with the exception of MSIE 9.0 and older.

Edit (March 2017): The state of the web got far less messy by now. So the linear-gradient (supported by Firefox and Internet Explorer) and -webkit-linear-gradient (supported by Chrome, Opera and Safari) lines are sufficient, additional prefixed versions are no longer necessary.

CSS3 Linear gradient on IE10

Your OP declaration will not work. No, falling back to an image is not necessary. Your declaration is just NOT valid. Explain what you want to do between a 'linear' or a 'circular' gradient .. or just go to http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ and rebuild your line.

You are looking for something like this (cross-browser backward compatible):

.shadow {

background: -moz-linear-gradient(left,  rgba(0,0,0,1) 0%, rgba(0,0,0,0.03) 31%, rgba(0,0,0,0) 32%, rgba(0,0,0,0) 100%);
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(left,  rgba(0,0,0,1) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,0.03) 31%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 32%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 100%);
background: -o-linear-gradient(left,  rgba(0,0,0,1) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,0.03) 31%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 32%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 100%);
background: linear-gradient(to right,  rgba(0,0,0,1) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,0.03) 31%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 32%,rgba(0,0,0,0) 100%);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#000000', endColorstr='#00000000',GradientType=1 );
}

jsFiddle with yours and mine where you can play

[Post notes]

About IE: the "filter" rule is for IE9-, preview releases of IE10 used a "-ms" prefixed syntax, and IE10 onwards use the standard syntax.

For detailed information, see the linear-gradient page on MDN.

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