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."

Comments

Shows what competion can do.

[xzvf]

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.

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[jrumney]

Microsoft has long had a policy of translating into German and Japanese first. German words tend to be longer than other languages (except perhaps Dutch) so translation into German catches problems where text overflows the space allocated for it on the screen, and Japanese catches all the stupid character==byte assumptions that programmers make. I'm not sure why they don't do Arabic early as well to flush out left to right assumptions (also affecting Hebrew) and assumptions that characters have a one to one relationship with glyphs (also affecting Indian and South East Asian scripts).

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[ColdWetDog]

You come off as an angry 14-year-old who hasn't the faintest clue what's going on.

Maybe he is a 14-year old who hasn't the faintest clue what's going on, you insensitive clod.

Standards-complient or not?

[tomandlu]

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.

Excellent feature...

[HetMes]

..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.

Extensions are bad?

[Cryophallion]

and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for

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.

Re:Extensions are bad?

[mdwh2]

It's not that extensions are bad, it's just more of a hassle if the functionality is not included as standard.

It's one reason I can't be bothered to try switching from Opera. Sure, I've downloaded Firefox, but I don't have to time to try to hunt down all the extensions to replicate Opera's standard functionality, and wonder if each extension is the one I want.

This is even more of an issue if you are trying to persuade a random non-geek user to switch from IE - you can't say "Go to this link", instead you have to say "Go here, then install it, then go here, here and here, and install all those things". For now, Firefox has done well because its standard features are still better than IE (and the extra standard features of Opera do not seem to be known by as many people). But you can't expect an average user to grapple with trying to hunt down extensions, just to replicate what'll be standard behaviour in IE.

As for bloatware, you need to compare real world filesizes. Last time I checked, Opera was still smaller than Firefox (even without any extensions), though I haven't checked the current sizes.

Re:Press the button and protect your privacy ....

[Apple Acolyte]

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.

Re:Oh, I'd like a version

[Gavagai80]

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.

So what?

[Viol8]

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.