IE8 by the end of 2008

Dave1975

Active Member
Hey guys,

Who's had chance to try the second BETA of IE8?
Apparently new features include Crash Recovery and private browsing, sounds like Microsoft are making a reply to the newly released Google Chrome.

It also claims to have vastly improved its standards support, something that every web designer and developer must have had frustrations with IE over the years! Lead program manager from MS, Doug Stamper had this to say in a recent interview, "We're now CSS 2.1 property complete, meaning we've implemented every property in CSS 2.1 and are closing in on our goal of complete support for the CSS 2.1 specification by the time we release."

IE8 promised to be more stable, like Chrome, it uses multiple processes to run each individual browsing tab, meaning if one tab goes down it doesn't crash the whole browser window. All we need now is for a forced update for IE6 users! :p

Greg
 
Hi Greg.
Yeah I use IE8 quite a bit, I do like it.

It's CSS support is very much improved and if the site is not complex IE will behave like Safari or Firefox.

However if it doen't place this at the top of the page -

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

And the IE8 browser will display the code to IE7 standards. Therefore writting code for IE7 will mean it will display in both.

IE8 is set to use IE8 mode by default, and there is a button for you to click to load the page in IE7 mode if it breaks. The code above overrides the default settings and displays it in IE7 mode from the off.

It's dev tools are not as great as Safari and FireFox's but they are still very impressive.

IE8's accelorators are to me the best thing about it that and it's vastly improved JS handling.

It's rendering speed is good but at the mo to me any way not great. I need to update my ram to be honest, all these dam mutiple processes are not that great when you have Vista running on 1GB of Ram TBH.

In fact IE8 was released before Chrome it was just over shadowed unfortunatly and IE9 is rummored to use webkit as the rendering agent if you haven't heard.

But IE6 unfortunatly will not be upgraded by force, the main users of IE6 are corporate business, by mass updating they force new technogoly on people, they then have to work it out, and it will lose man hours for businesses as a result until they learn.

Ever seen people try to use the new version of Office in a business environment? That as IE7 is better but there is a learning curve so why upgrade from something that works already.

So IE6 will remain till the corporations decide to upgrade themselves because by forcing the upgrade there is the chance for them to move to FF, Safari, Opera. By keeping them there is a higher chance they will just upgrade to IE8/9 due to the same reason, they chose when to upgrade and are not forced to.

At the end of the day it's about keeping the customer happy, not pissing them off by an unesercary upgrade to a new technology that will lose working hours. Regardless to how much that pisses us off lol

Jaz
 
Hay official word Internet Explorer 8, wont be out till at least May 09.

So we can hopefully hope for more CSS3, transitions, box shadow, text shadow, nth-child, font referancing using the .tff format, rounded corners, mutiple backgound images would all be nice, doubt we will see any though, can always hope though, hay.
 
The thing that annoys me about this is all the shout about how it's better for developers and more standards compliant; guess what?

Too f**king late!

It's going to be at least 2-3 years (from May 09) before the masses make the transition from 7 to 8, in the same way that the amount of people using IE6 is still so high. Given that its a MS product I still don't expect IE8 to be perfect but I would expect that the ability to use a browser specific stylesheet on it has also gone.

In terms of making it easy for developers, out of all the browsers IE is the odd one out, so I'll eat my underpants the day I say "wow IE8 is actually as good as FF"
 
No I agree it is something that Microsoft has slacked on, the other 2 major ones, being Windows Live Search, which even now gives great results but is still shadowed by the fact that Google has now become a house hold name, a bit like Hoover did in the vacum cleaner industry, which has cost Microsoft billions each year, and Vista. All 3 of which they have admitted that they weren't prepared for or didn't realise that they could have done by far a better job with them.

I mean Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.
IE8 is what IE7 should have been.

The problem was with IE6, which when it first came out was by far the market leader in everything, that and the fact that they had 98/99% market share, and Apple losing the PC/MAC war ment they got complacent.

Imagine what the net would be like if the MAC, with Safari, was as popular as the PC, with IE?

But yeah the problem, you are right IMO is the time frame, but I personally think it will be more like 6-7 years TBH.

The thing they are still not getting, god knows why as all the others already do it, is rather than just releasing IE8, upgrade IE7 to IE8 by default, it would just be a normal windows update then, if you didn't change the interface but just the rendering and CSS improvements then people would have no learning curve, thus it would be far better all round.

Imagine if we had to design for FF2, FF3, Safari2, Safari 3, Opera7, Opera8, Opera9, IE6, IE7 and IE8 seriously what would be the point?

But I personally reckon they have delayed it because of Chrome, which is Google's way of attacking IE's custom search function, because they are finally learning.

Rather than releasing a should be product, [cough] Vista, and annoying everyone release a more fully featured product, [cough] Windows 7, and finally get credit. The problem is and always has been, with IE, the limitations to thier rendering engine. IE7 was a totally rewrite of Trident, IE's rendering engine, hence a huge task, thus lack of development into CSS and proformance features due to the right people being tied up in other tasks, hopefully this delay is because of sorting any lack of the furture out and hence a better product all round.

Here's hoping anyway.
Jaz
 
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