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IE8 Beta Released To Public
Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."
While IE8 doesn't work on my chosen platform, it shows again how open source sparks development in stagnant environments. This product would never have happened without Firefox.
I assume yes. Call me naive, but I suspect MS know that they have more to lose by breaking web standards. Basically, they can't get away with that sh*t anymore - at least as far as the web goes. The average user is probably no wiser, but there are enough special interest groups to keep an eye on them in this area.
..that will definitely be craved by many Slashdot users, and not because of the gift shopping or use of public terminals. Question is how long it will take before Firefox sees its market share diminish because of this feature, and, consequently, how long it will take Firefox to include it in an update.
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You say that like it is a bad thing. I prefer the use of extensions for my browser, instead of the bloatware that tends to happen. What if I don't care about privacy? I don't need that installed then. I like that I can choose the features I want, instead of having everything thrown in there.
Also, extensions have a great benefit with regards to updates. they can be updated at any time, and therefore don't have to wait on a new browser update for tweaking things and adding functionality. They also allow me to leave an extension that I don't want to update as is while still being able to update the browser (and possibly its security).
This is not to say that Firefox is not getting large, or that microsoft is not trying to assist people who don't have the savvy to look for extensions. I'm just saying extensions have a lot of benefits, and can be a very important tool.
If private browsing were on by default, then everyone other than /. geeks would think their browsers were dysfunctional for not saving login cookies and whatnot.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for.
That may be true. But given the speed that developments and innovations get put into FF and the general convenience of the plugin system I think I'll stage with the Fox. If there is anything amazingly good and useful you can be sure we'll all have it very soon indeed.
You don't have to go back if you don't want to, but there are many people still using IE, and it would be easier to write websites if every single bit of JS or CSS didn't have to have a workaround for it. If IE8 brings us one step closer to that dream, then I welcome it with open arms! Even if I'm not ever going to use it.
I believe they are talking about the logs kept by the ISP rather than anything stored on the machine itself.
Its currently the same situation for users who delete their own history, its gone from the local machine, but that does not mean it was not logged elsewhere.
liqbase
Considering a lot of people will just be wanting to browse at work or whatever and be able to easily find things in the history, I don't see why it should be on by default. Isn't 'browser privacy' basically just a way of hiding your pr0n-browsing history?
which is totally what she said
Lots of linux users would like to have IE, because we need to test websites in it. I have the wine versions of IE6 and IE7, but they're extremely slow and mostly broken, so a version from Microsoft would be great. And if it turned out to be the better browser, of course, I'd use it regularly.
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Do you still have to reboot after installing the IE8 application?
So not like Firefox 2 then, which has upgraded itself no less than 16 times on my PC here ? Firefox pushes out beta stuff too, then try to cover it with automatic patches. But they're OSS, so that makes it okay ...
You want MS to provide a linux version so that you can either state your intent to never install it, or so that you can sh*t on it? I'm sure they'll get right on that...
That's short sighted.
I would try IE8 if it ran on my platform of choice, which happens to be Kubuntu. If IE won't run on it, I won't try it. IE8 might be the best browser since Amaya, but if it won't run on my system, I won't try it.
Not all Linux users hate Microsoft or are FOSS zealots. Most of us just love Linux. We are open to trying MS products, and when MS creates a better product than Linux||Firefox then we will use it. I only wish that MS Office 2007 would run on Linux, I would pay for it and use it in a heartbeat. But I am not about to use MS's bloated, insecure operating system to get it.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Now if they would only give us some way of running multiple versions of IE side by side. There are still a lot of people using IE6, so I need to test sites against that. But I can't if I upgrade to IE7. And if I upgrade to IE8, I can't test against IE7 or IE6. We need a standalone version of IE6 for web developers to use for website testing. The time limited VM that they provide is a start, but I don't want to boot up an entire VM of Windows just to test one page.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Don't Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, and Galeon all use the Gecko rendering engine? What's the point if they all render the exact same? I understand that as a web developer, it would be useful to test on Opera, Safari, IE and Firefox, but not on the same rendering engine
The number of hindi speakers is probably 4 times that.
They don't release to the largest markets but the most useful ones for testing.
Besides , lets be honest - the spanish speaking world isn't exactly renowned for its cutting edge expanding IT industry.
A large portion of Spanish speakers (e.g. Latin America) live in extreme poverty, so I doubt they'll all be downloading IE8 Beta anytime soon.
What should be compared is how many German speakers with internet access and their own PC vs. how many Spanish speakers with internet access and their own PC.
Move all sig!
The only thing worth asking is this: is the plugin model still based on ActiveX and "security zones".
If so, IE is still not acceptable for use with any site that is not completely trusted.
They don't have to do anything to the desktop - they can just look at their proxy/firewall/router logs. Your choice of browser does nothing to stop corporate tracking/filtering.
Most of us just love Linux.
Like hell. There's a very common saying, and it's pretty damn true: "BSD users use BSD because they love Unix. Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows."
Go look at Ubuntu Forums or Linux Questions or any of the other community sites; it's a huge whack of Microsoft hate (often leading them to convince themselves that what they're using is better than it actually is, but hey, that's part of the open-source gig these days).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The point of Firefox, from the beginning, was to split this kind of functionality off into extensions, so that users can pick and choose what features they need, without being forced to accept bloat.
(Yes, ironically Firefox was an attempt to make a browser-only, bloat-free version of Mozilla. People sometimes talk, now, of doing the same to Firefox...)
Given that, I would call this:
brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for.
That's Firefox's strength, not a weakness.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't let XP upgrade to IE 7. I don't like the interface and it still 'feels' wrong. Probably because as someone pointed out above, it is even slower than IE 6 (which I liked okay).
Which makes you part of the problem -- part of the reason I, as a web developer, have to ensure our website works on IE6.
IE7 is a lot of things -- among them, it's more standards-compliant.
I get better functionality out of Firefox 3 with a couple of plugins.
So do I -- which is why, on XP, I do upgrade IE, and then barely use it outside of a Firefox IETab.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yep, that's my one beef with FF.
I use FF for basic browsing (without many extensions) and I mostly think it's great. Rarely crashes, renders most sites fine, etc.
But I really, really don't like the apparently single-threadedness. Each tab should be its own thread, IMO, so that when one tab is busy with some random java applet, the others are still getting enough CPU slices to actually be usable.
Another time you get this behavior is when you open multiple tabs one right after the other. The tab you are viewing slows to a crawl while content is loaded in the other tabs.
I'm not saying this is better in Opera/IE/Safari/Lynx, but I'd really like to see this fixed.
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Perfect for visiting internet cafes or libraries.
Only if you're not particularly paranoid. Let's look at this again:
It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit.
That implies both that you actually exit, and that you're actually running an unmodified version of Opera Portable. It also assumes that the host filesystem is actually overwriting the same blocks... and a few other things.
It also implies that you haven't already been pwned by something as simple as a keylogger.
So, better than nothing, but you've got to figure that whatever you do on a public terminal is public knowledge. Any attempt to prevent that is playing an arms race that you will lose.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You should be testing IE in the environment in which your site visitors will be running it - on Windows.
Testing Safari on Windows is very different to testing Safari on MacOSX - if your objective is to catch issues before the public would see them, you need to test browser Y on OS Z - not just browser Y on any old OS.
If Microsoft *did* release IE for Linux, that is ANOTHER browser/OS combination I would have to test for.