May Contain Nuts

So, I’ve been fiddling around with IE8 Beta 1 today, and have a short list of notes thus far.  I haven’t put it through any serious paces, so this list will probably grow over time, but for now, here’s the shake-down…

Nice:

• “Super-standards” mode on all non-quirks pages out of the box.  “Nice” is an understatement.
• Passes Acid2 (as long as it’s on the webstandards.org site; acid2.acidtests.org fails, apparently due to a cross-domain request issue that’s being worked on, so it’s a conditional passage, but still way better than the grenade-victim look of the smiley face in IE7).
• Wide buttons successfully render their corners in Windows XP.  Previously, if a button became too wide, the edges of the button would become super-pixelated.  Looks like someone back-ported a fix to IE7/Vista for this release.  Thank god.
• An “Emulate IE7″ button is included to force the browser back to IE7’s rendering mode and user-agent.
• Based on the demo at MIX this morning, there’s a sweet set of developer tools, including in-engine JS debugging.  This trumps even the Web Developer toolkit for Firefox, which is sort of a gold standard for dev tools (Safari’s ain’t bad either though).

Not so nice:

• Buttons still scale horizontally out or proportion with the contents of the button itself.  It’s like every character you pile on adds some number of pixels to the left and right padding for reasons that completely escape me.
• IE8 scores a 17 on the Acid3 test.  While it’s better than the score of 13(?) that IE7 gets, it’s still woefully far behind Opera 9.26 (46/100), Firefox 2 (51/100), Firefox 3 Beta 3 (59/100), and Safari 3 Build 31A15 (76/100).  While I won’t be placing bets on who passes Acid3 first, I’d be willing to put money on who passes it last…
• The “Emulate IE7″ button requires a complete restart of IE before it will take effect.  I also somehow doubt that this feature will last into the final release (especially if it remains this mean to the user), which is sad, because it’s obvious enough what it does that it could help alleviate some of the headaches that will inevitably arise from MS “breaking the web” again (and hopefully for the final time, though I wouldn’t count on that given the Acid3 compliance).
• The developer tools are apparently really, really buggy.  I thought this was a developer release… whoops?
• The UI is still crap, but that’s aesthetics, not web standards, so whatever.

Otherwise intriguing:

• Activities looks like an expanded take on Microformats, which I actually wouldn’t mind seeing other companies like Google, Mozilla, and Apple jumping on the bandwagon for.  Apple’s already got the whole data detector thing going on in OS X, with hooks for it in more than just Mail by the looks of a few tips on macosxhints.com, so this seems like a decent enough initiative to adopt as well.  It’s even being released under a Creative Commons license, so hooray for non-proprietary-ness…
• WebSlices look like Microsoft’s version of WebClips, only built into the bookmark bar instead of the Dashboard (or Sidebar… guess they couldn’t do the Sidebar integration if it’s supposed to be an XP feature too…)  Practically speaking, I think I prefer the WebClips approach, which lets you capture any portion of any webpage, rather than just those sections that the web developers of certain sites have deigned it appropriate to let you save.  The bookmark bar integration is admittedly more accessible than the Dashboard though, in most instances, though, so that’s nice.
• Domain name highlighting looks like Yet Another Useless Feature to try and keep people from doing retarded things online.  If red (well, pink) address bars, huge certificate failure notifications, and phishing alert notifications in the browser aren’t enough to get someone to realize they’re about to get themselves scammed, making the domain name stand out from the rest of the URL sure as hell ain’t gonna do anything to help.  I’m betting on it being more confusing than anything else, honestly…

I will be following IE8’s beta cycle with supreme interest, if only because I want to see just how much more work Microsoft is going to make me do to get my sites to render properly in IE8, but so far all of my work-related stuff seems to be doing well, which is hardly surprising given that it renders will in other standards-compliant browsers…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Computing, Internet, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.