Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1

mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."

Comments

No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

They can keep all their little incremental security and interface updates. What use are a few little tweaks in IE8, when Firefox offers me add-ons like adblock plus, noscript, slashdotter, etc.? Besides, I can always open a site with IE Tab if I need to.

Firefox is even nice enough to spell check my form entries for me (it caught me misspelling "incremental" just now).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

I did a search and couldn't find any ad blockers. Can anyone provide a direct link?

Standards

[Mrs. Grundy]

I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.

Re:Standards

[mikael_j]

You keep talking about failing usability yet I don't see how Safari/WebKit is worse than the horrible mess that Internet Explorer is, and Firefox certainly isn't free of issues. If anything I'd say that the user experience with Safari/WebKit is much more pleasant than both IE and FF. Or maybe you simply don't like how they're not filled with retarded crap like IE's "protected mode"? Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert? (A warning I can understand and support but when I stumble upon someone's personal website that happens to use a self-signed cert I end up jumping through a bunch of hoops because they're assuming the average user will somehow read the warnings and not just click randomly until they see the website (or give up and call someone (me) to help them deal with the "problem").

I'm sorry but I just don't see these usability issues you're talking about, and I like having a browser that's actually follows the standards.

/Mikael

I need stability

[skomes]

I still use Opera + IE6. Why IE6? Stability. These damn browsers never give up the memory they've taken, although chrome does a better job because it actually runs each tab in a seperate process. With IE6 I open a window, browse youtube, close site, and the memory is returned. I use Opera with javascript turned off, a low overhead browser that will save all my pages if a crash occurs.

Re:I need stability

[WankersRevenge]

You have no idea the IE6 memory leaks that our team dev deals with on a daily basis. It's pure madness. Nevermind the hell it takes to get a page to render proper. Once IE6 marketshare drops to insignificant proportions, you will start seeing its ugly face surface since devs won't be catering to its craptacular bugs. I'm sure you are already seeing the results of its drunken css renderer.

It's funny ... I used to be a diehard Mozilla supporter from .70 days. These days, I can't go a day without wanting to toss firefox out the window with it's "fat guy at the buffet" attitude towards my system resources. If it weren't for a couple of extensions, I would either be in Opera-land or swimming with chrome.

Re:I need stability

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I'm seeing IE6 usage near 20% these days (I'm in the UK btw), and once it gets below 10% (9.99% will be enough for me!) then I'll be making less effort to accommodate it in new web sites. It'll take me *considerably* less time to develop web sites when I don't need to worry about IE6.... so I'm looking forward to that day! :D

Oh... and my point was that you'll probably find IE6 is less supported on many websites over the next year or two.

Re:No shortcuts

[conureman]

The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.

Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to install it when I noticed: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Visual Studio .NET (version 7.0 from 2002) are currently incompatible. If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Visual Studio .NET will crash. No workaround is currently available. Yeah, I kind of need .NET 1.1 to work for some parts of my job.

Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

No? What's that? Microsoft closed out the bugs as "works as intended?" Fail.

Something to credit Microsoft for

In case it's not clear, I have a firey hatred for IE8. Not so much the product itself, but what it represents. What it represents is a flagpole in the ground stating, "We're going to stand in the way of progress for our own selfish reasons".

While I can understand that Microsoft feels that the market is slipping from their grasp, I cannot support their methods of attempting to compete. Which is to say that they are using their power to prevent competition rather than building a superior product. As Joel pointed out in his excellent article on the Windows API being lost:

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's [Windows] API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of excitement..."

If you truly want to understand what is wrong with this browser, take some time and go through these examples:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/

Those only scratch the surface of what is really wrong with IE and Microsoft's stance on improving their web browser. For further reference, RC1 of IE8 gets a 20/100 on ACID3. This compares poorly to FireFox3's 56-59/100, Webkit nightly's 100/100, and Opera dev version's 100/100(!).

Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.

(Yes, I am aware that many businesses can't take the hit. But we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere can easily be everything from your personal site to your new venture that's betting on early adopters of advanced web technology. IE's market share is already plummeting. If we can get enough momentum, we can near-eliminate this unsightly browser from the web. Remember Netscape 4's inability to keep up? This is the exact same situation all over again, except this time the solution is not a total mono-culture.)

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Bogtha]

And by the time IE9 is out, there will be something else to support

Actually, by the time Internet Explorer 6 was out, there was something else to support. The DOM 2 Events specification, an intrinsic part of modern JavaScript, was published in 2000, almost a year before Internet Explorer 6, and even the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 still won't have support for it. That's why all the modern JavaScript libraries like jQuery have workaround code to translate the Internet Explorer event model into the standard event model shared by all the other browsers.

So yes, there will be plenty to work on for Internet Explorer 9, but it will be yet more stuff that other browsers implemented years ago, not a moving target.

Interesting statistic

[elashish14]

IE shipping with a feature before FF has it ( private browsing mode).

Well that's something you don't see every day.

Re:Interesting statistic

[Matthieu Araman]

humm, both IE8 and Firefox 3.1 will include a private browsing feature but neither have "shipped".
But you're right that IE included it before in a beta and that increased the priority on the firefox people...
Time will say which of these version ship the first (in a non beta, non rc mode)

Third party tracking

[AnalPerfume]

I notice one of the features listed is the ability to prevent third parties from tracking your web browsing habits, which would presumably mean "anyone other than the owner". Since Microsoft believe in retaining ownership of the software and licensing it to you, do they consider themselves a third party? Or is this just a convenient little "block the competition, while leaving a loophole for us"?

Um, nice try I suppose.

[Gordo_1]

I was curious to see what they'd done since the last beta, so I installed it this morning. I had to reboot not once, but twice (once to uninstall IE8 beta2 and again I'm guessing so that it could hook into some OS files that were in use.)

After restarting the second time, it popped up some shenanigans about some add-ons not being enabled and some being out-of-date and not working. Huh? There's apparently two dozen different plugins and "helpers" installed, including 3 java widgits, a slew of Adobe stuff, and a whole lotta live.com and other MS cruft. Hmmm... Gotta admit, I have no idea what half this stuff does and I'm in Computer Security. Can you imagine the average user figuring out which one of these is the rogue add-on responsible for stealing their credit cards and redirecting their search queries to a click fraud site? Firefox's extension system is a breath of fresh air compared to this.

IE8 beta2 scored a pitiful 21/100 on acid3, RC1 now scores 20/100. Apparently acid3 is not yet a development target for MS. Seeing as their answer to web developers wanting more freedom to be creative is to "do it in Silverlight", it doesn't surprise that MS is dragging their feet here. I honestly wonder if half the stuff acid3 tests for will ever see the light of day in a top 500 website. I suspect FFx + Chrome + Safari + Opera and others will need to achieve greater than 50% market share before MS gets serious about SVG and company.

I find it amusing that IE8 gives users control over rendering like "older browsers" for incompatible websites (read: websites that were designed to work under the standards-ignorant IE6).

On the plus side:
- as for most modern browsers, it seems to render most of the top websites reasonably well.
- it has some privacy thingamajig which allows you to manually disallow sites one by one from storing cookies on your system (or at least that's how I interpretted the vague MS description)

Yeah, but I eventually had to close it when I realized how insanely annoying the web is without AdBlock Plus.

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[aurispector]

Heh. The guy I work for has xp machines running on 256mb ram, unpatched ie6 & no sp3. The people he pays to "manage" his system send around a guy that runs spybot, ad-aware and some random virus scanner; He does not know what a rootkit is, nor does he insure all the machines are fully patched (a process that can be fully automated with a single click). When something breaks they order something expensive from Dell and mark it up.

Bottom line? Morons make the world go around. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.