IE8 Beta is FINALLY out of Beta. We’re friends with a developer on the Microsoft IE8 team and to say that he has been under pressure the last few months would be an understatement. There have been numerous problems and missed deadlines but the question is does the end product match the effort that appears to have gone in to it?
Let’s cover the major features you would expect of any browser here and see how IE8 shapes up against the competition.
Security
Is IE8 more secure than FireFox and Chrome? Unfortunately not. Within a few days of release it was hacked and regardless of the brash claims Steve Ballmer makes about IE8 having security that “no other browser can match” unfortunately no browser is 100% safe. Alas IE8 is no exception however it is more secure than IE7.
Features
On the surface of it IE8 does have some powerful new features. The only problem is that the majority of these are already available in other younger browsers such as FireFox and Google Chrome. For example IE8 provides InPrivate browsing — which allows you to browse without leaving any trace of your searches or pages viewed. Chrome offered this functionality from the moment it hit the shelves in Beta!
Add-ins called Accelerators help you to find associated info for the page you’re looking at without opening another tab; while tabbed groups open colour-coded related tabs so you can see at a glance all the pages you’ve got open on a particular topic. Unfortunately for Microsoft this functionality and much more is easily replicated using the multitude of free plug ins available for FireFox via https://addons.mozilla.org/
In terms of features IE8 does not bring anything new to the table. Microsoft have simply caught up with the competition.
Cross browser compatibility
I could write pages on the daily struggle we have here at Atlas ensuring that websites work cross browser. It sucks us of our time and energy leaving less time for actual feature development when we’re creating web applications. The sooner the big browser players bash their heads together and come up with a way forward for compliance across all browsers we’re stuck with this problem, but how does IE8 shape up against its predecessors in this regard?
It’s easy to tell that at the very least Microsoft have given cross browser compatibility some thought in this version of IE. IE8 provides an IE7 compatibility mode that you can quickly enable if the page you’re viewing doesn’t render as you would expect. Developers also have the ability to specify the rendering engine that IE8 should use by inserting a very simple meta tag in their pages. This makes ensuring your pages appear as you wish them too a little easier – more information can be found here - http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx
To summarise
You’ll be pleased to hear that IE8 is better than IE7. However it is very unlikely in our opinion that IE8 is going to see a slow down in the marketplace share that Microsoft are losing in the browser wars.
For Atlas the release of IE8 is yet another reason for people to move away from IE6. We’ve seen a consistant decline in the use of IE6 over the last few years, and as an organisation we have decided that when IE6 use is under 12% we will advise our customers not to cater for IE6 on any new web development projects with very few exceptions.
Why not download a copy of IE8 and make your own opinion? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
