August 28, 2008: IE8 beta 2
Short and sweet: I have found no showstoppers, and several things to really like, in IE8 beta2 (running on my Vista system). If your web browser isn’t mission critical, go ahead and give IE8b2 a try. It won’t bite.
IE8b1 did bite. It rendered many pages terribly; required a close-and-reopen cycle to switch to compatibility mode, and didn’t understand anchor tags. It stayed on my system less than an hour before I reverted back to IE7. Which is a nice thing to know, by the way: if you have problems with the beta, simply uninstall it (the normal way: Control Panel, Programs and Features), and your system reverts back to the IE7 you had before.
IE8 by default renders every new page in standards mode. That makes web devs happy since they no longer have to apply IE-specific hacks to make their pages look nice, but sometimes can throw you for a loop, because pages with IE-specific hacks can actually look bad in standards mode. It’s not a problem though; just click the compatibility button and IE8 will re-render the page in what I’m calling “IE hacks mode”. It will also remember that setting for the next time you visit that page. Nice.
The biggest improvement in IE8 is speed. I have not done objective measurements but to me, pages seem to load a lot faster in IE8, and that is indeed a welcome improvement. Other improvements:
- CTRL-F (Find) now does not create a dialog box that blocks your view of the page. Instead it opens a toolbar at the top of the page.
- Tabs are now isolated from one another. One hanging web page doesn’t kill all your other sessions.
- When you close IE8, there is no more ‘remember tabs for next session’ option. Instead, next time you open IE8, you have the option to ‘reopen last browsing session.’
- IE8 closes a lot faster than IE7 did. IE7 used to sort of sit on the second-to-last tab it was closing for a long time (a minute or more) on my system. IE8 closes in about 2 seconds.
- Tabs are colorcoded and grouped. So all tabs which were opened from one page, share the same color as that page. Handy.
- The address bar, once you start typing in it, is a lot smarter. I did note that sometimes I could not tab to the top choice in it, though! Had to actually point ‘n’ click with the mouse. Hope they fix that.
These are just the features which stood out for me as I played with it today. They seem like little things - but for me, they’ve already made web browsing much more pleasant. There are more new things; Ed Bott talks about them, and so does the IE8 team. The release notes (for Vista) are here. This version is said to be feature complete: from here to release, the IE8 team will be working on bug and performance fixes as well as documentation writing.
IE8 is definitely going to save me some time and frustration throughout the working day. It’s a keeper!
