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Wednesday, April 29, 2009 3:11 PM
Some Good:The new JavaScript debugger is good and the CSS support is of course a lot better.A few issues touching on both JavaScript and CSS support (like styled list items where the whole of the list item area is clickable) have been fixed, which is good to see.Compositing is MUCH faster (e.g. DHTML performs much better particularly if making heavy use of translucent PNG's). I am particularly happy about this. This allows for some very cool stuff going forward.Some Bad:Unfortunately there seem to be a small number of new issues where the CSS rendering deviates from earlier versions of MSIE as well as Firefox and Safari, though these are mostly minor.It would have been nice to see a couple of additional features now common in both Webkit and Gecko (e.g. corner rounding, native canvas support) but I will settle for the reasonable support for existing standards.Some (still) Ugly:The user interface design is still bad. i. The fixed-navigation-buttons-above-the-menubar implementation idea hasn't gotten any better with time.ii. The secondary menu on the right is bad - it's confusing, inconsistent and the menu items badly organized.ii. If you have the normal menu enabled (common, as that's the only place you can find a host of otherwise hidden options) you end totally different menu's called "Tools" on the toolbar. iii. Things like Windows Live give you even more inconsistently designed and redundant options - it's in Microsoft's interest that the integration here be better.Honestly, it's so bad it could be a parody of poor interface design. This problem takes care of itself however, as it's the sort of thing drives end users to Firefox, much more so than CSS rendering issues.Overall, I am content with MSIE8, but then I don't use it as my primary browser (either for development or browsing), purely for compatibility testing.That said, it's sufficiently reasonable that I can see myself not bothering to install Firefox on a Windows system just to get a decent browsing experience, so I'd say that counts as a success. As a developer I'm quite happy if end users are running MSIE 8 it requires little-to-no specific work to target for - although I sadly suspect will be some time yet before the bulk of users are migrated from MSIE 6 and 7.
Thanks for taking the time Iain. Appreciated
None of the above - I'm a little surprised there's not just a "I like the focus on standards" option. Accidental or deliberate omission? :-)I like the focus on standards. I think it's essential.I will definitely *not* be targeting any of the extra features of IE8. I am solely interested in having a standards-compliant web browser available on the gorilla of operating systems.
I must say that I am impressed by the new features, however I don't know any web developers that actually use IE. We only venture over there when we need to test.IE doesn't need developer tools, because developers don't use it. What did really impress me however was the standards compliance. This means that now when I write my site I can be sure it will work across most browsers.Now MS needs to physically force everybody to upgrade, without option, to the browser that actually works!But seriously. Firefox rules the browser world these days. Compare the number of downloads of Firefox with the number of (non-automatic) downloads of IE8.
Agree with comments above. I don't know any web developers who use IE other than for compatibility testing, so utility of new dev facilities is moot.Web standard support is crucial, so this will be a vast improvement. But I shall be sticking to Firefox for the foreseeable future.
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