Many of you have likely seen my “Why IE Sucks” page which I advertise to all my visitors using an Internet Explorer browser. I got a comment in response to it asking what I thought about IE8. I was going to reply directly to the comment, but then what I had to say turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be. Thus, I decided to create a new post for everyone to read. Here it is.
I admit I have been really behind in my IE8 experiences. In some ways I am happy because this proves just how distant from Microsoft I am truly becoming. In other ways, it is kind of disappointing because it is hard to make a quality bash on a product unless I am at least somewhat familiar with it. I think I just updated to IE8 on a Windows XP VM last night. I have not used it yet, however. Though from the brief dabbling from Net Renderer I have done, IE8 is not too bad. From what I have seen, it even renders this site correctly which is more than any previous version of IE can say. I do find it funny there is a compatibility mode to try to prevent the “catastrophe” that was the upgrade from IE6 to IE7. It will not be overly useful going forward, but it helps manage the first year or so while developers make the transition to a standards-oriented version. Overall, it seems to hold its own with Firefox 3.0, but still is slightly behind Firefox 3.5 which just released a couple of weeks ago.
From what I have read online, IE8 passes the ACID2 test, but does terrible on the ACID3 test. As much as this pains me, I have to give Microsoft props for making the effort to fall in line with some of the most popular standards. I would not say they have the best browser out there, but they did considerably narrow the gap as far as web standards are concerned. I cannot speak on the usability, but at least IE7 made huge gains there too with things like tabbed-browsing. If they keep following this path, I will have a hard time continuing to laugh at Internet Explorer. Do not expect this to make me a Microsoft fanboy or even start using their products anytime soon, but maybe I will hate them just a little less. There will be more to come on Microsoft and its plans for the future in the near future.
P.S. Yes, that is right. I did just use future twice in the same sentence!
One Response to “Internet Explorer 8: First Glance”
Something tells me that it is going to take years for Micro$oft to even come close to the likes of Firefox. And that’s the screaming problem… Apple stays right on top of things with Safari, Firefox is always changing with user generated content, and M$ seems to be in the position of always playing catch-up. You think a billion dollar business would want to retain their customers.
I wish some of those “Buy a PC” commercials would show one of the first things that the users did when they arrived home (after crying over how annoying Vista is)… and this is, install Firefox.