First Look at IE 8 Beta
(Originally Posted March 7, 2008)
At Microsoft’s 08 MiX conference the beta for the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 was made available for download. If you want to get the beta you can go here. This is only a beta version and is meant mostly for developers. And it’s a good thing because IE 8 will break sites designed for IE 7 because with IE 8 Microsoft is supporting CSS and other web standards. Wait did I hear that right? Yes, Microsoft which from the very beginning was breaking web sites by its quirky implementation of CSS, is now breaking web sites with proper use of web standards.
User Interface
The user interface is very similar to the IE 7. Lets look at the screenshot.
If you’re used to the icon positioning in IE 7 than IE 8 will come naturally, but if you are switching from another browser like firefox you will probably be confused with the placement. For example the refresh button is placed on the address bar where the rss feed icon used to be. One thing that I like about the UI for IE 8 is that they brought back the file and edit menus. Its absence on IE 7 is the main reason why I never used it.
Emulate IE 7
As I said earlier IE 8 will now follow web standards for CSS, AJAX, and RSS. However many web sites were written to work with the quirky behavior of IE 7 and older versions. Many of the hacks used in these pages will cause the page to break in the beta of IE 8. Currently Google maps will break if viewed in IE 8.
However the folks in Microsoft have a solution and IE 8 has the ability to run in several different modes. Web developers have the ability to tag a page as only running in an earlier version of IE and the browser would be able to render the page as it would have in IE 7 or 6. Users can also manually change the browser to emulate IE 7 by pushing the emulate IE 7 button. I’m very happy that the strict adherence to web standards is activated by default, but my only complaint is that in order to switch to the IE 7 mode you have to close the browser and restart it. It would be much better if you could switch between IE 7 mode and standards mode more seamlessly.
Other Features
IE 8 keeps the heightened security “protected mode” that was introduced in IE 7 which makes the browser significantly more secure. It has another new security feature which bolds the root domain name on the address bar.
This is a great feature to protect against phishing attacks because it will be easier to identify the actual root domain and domains such as secure.ebay.someothersite.com.
IE 8 has a couple other new features that are quite interesting. One is called activities which would easily allow users to share web content with services like facebook, or to look them up with encarta. The Other is WebSlices which are similar to feeds and allow users to monitor items on a web site while they are surfing. Activities and WebSlices are very interesting, and I will devote a future blog post to them.
Internet Explorer 8 is more stable than IE 7 that is why i like it. I always experience freezing browser window in IE 7.
Comment by bodydetox — July 30, 2009 @ 7:07 am