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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."
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).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you use any version of IE and you are not:
1) Using it out of the box just to download another browser, or
2) A web developer who needs it on a test box
Then GTFO idjit.
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 â" the first browser to include such protections.
No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.
It's just that, with FireFox, anything that isn't related to bare simple display of HTML pages, is usually tucked into separate plugins.
But the Noscript plugin has featured click-jacking prevention almost from the next day after click-jacking came in the news.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
Heh. Not in comparison to Firefox, but my copy of Konqueror on KDE leaves both of them in its dust.
But aside from resource demands (and I'll wait until I can try it properly before I make any judgements), IE8 looks quite nice. I'd certainly be willing to try it out if they made a version for non-Windows systems. How about it Microsoft - fancy branching out?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Yeah the obligatory complaint about those 30% or so that keep using 6 (according to my stats). Maybe with 8 out 7 will become the 6.
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.
The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
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.
Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998. Truly, they deserve all the credit they are going to get for being so ahead of the curve. Keep innovating, Microsoft! Don't let those slow-coaches at the W3C hold you back!
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
No? What's that? Microsoft closed out the bugs as "works as intended?" Fail.
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:
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.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
IE shipping with a feature before FF has it ( private browsing mode).
Well that's something you don't see every day.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
There may be a number of good technical and use-oriented reasons not to bother with IE8. I don't know the details on it just yet. But it could be twice as good as the next browser and I still wouldn't use it. Not after what Microsoft did to us all with earlier versions. The standards compliance problems have been infuriating for developers. How much human effort has been wasted trying to cope with this? And the vulnerabilities have made popular computing a diseased seething mass. How many geeks have had to spend evenings or whole weekends taking care friends and family members' systems?
All of that and Microsoft let IE rot for how many years? Half a freakin' decade in the midst of humanity's glorious ascension into a networked era? It took competition forcefully wedging its way into IE's monopolistic stranglehold before Microsoft got off their asses to do anything.
Well, it's too late. Fuck off.
I'm no battered wife. I know that MS isn't "really a good husband, he just..." whatever. I'd rather other people not drag me into another round of this same neglected-until-it-matters-to-Microsoft bullshit. The fewer people who use IE, the better.
This has been a very active couple of days for MS stories. Lots of big things happening between layoffs and beta releases.
Let's look at some facts though.
Windows marketshare is 90%.
IE's marketshare is 70%
Slashdot users run somwhere between 47% and 70% MS Windows based OS.(http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1516&aid=-1, http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=848&aid=-1)
In the last four days Slashdot has had 9 MS stories ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=109)
In the last four days Slashdot has has 97 stories posted ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl )
What percentage of stories about MS have run in the past four days?
9/97 = 0.092 * 100 = 9.2%
Facts hardly look as bad as you make them out to be.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Not until they ship Windows 7. Then, if they do that, have at it.
* When you are composing your +5 Insightful masterpiece of a post that utterly eviscerates a company for an alleged GPL copyright violation you have to do so while listening to your multi-terrabyte pirated(aka copyright violation) music collection.
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"?
Just because something is a standard doesn't mean it is a good standard and I wonder about CSS being a good standard.
I congratulate the committee that created it on actually getting something out the door, that is an accomplishment for any committee. However, I don't think it is too much to ask that the new standard actually work better then what was already there. Tables were clunky and misused, but for formatting a web page, they still work better and are easier to understand. It's frustrating to spend days trying to get CSS to render something simple to only tear it all out and redo it in tables in a few minutes.
Was there really a huge demand for floating elements back in 1998?
If his gay lover is anything like IE, I'd certainly hope so. No one should be exposed to that kind of depravity.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You'd have had a point if, in 1998, there was any other browser, released or in beta, that had full CSS2 support. But there wasn't. In fact, the one that was closest to supporting it at that time was... IE.
Ubuntu 8.04 shipped with Firefox 3.0 beta.
The CSS specification includes support for display: table; display: table-row; and display: table-cell;
which are quite useful when you need table-like layout.
Shame IE never supported them. Until *drumroll* IE8 - shame they aren't doing so well on other fronts.
But, fortunately, you can work around this. Yes, it is a bit more work, but that is not the fault of CSS.
Additionally, working around it just takes a little getting used to.
Those singing the praises of table layout in some cases just never got the hang of a more fluid layout. Hopefully you're not in that camp.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Its not that I hate them for the quality of the browser not released yet, despite having probably a 100 chances to do something right, but because of all the years I spent having to deal with buggy and bloated code from a company whose business model embraces mediocrity and dishonesty -- on multiple levels. A leopard does not change its spots. They can't be trusted, period. They have done much more to harm the advance of technology than to help it. That's what chafes most people's arses. They are the problem (or part of it), not the solution.
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.
And with the release they're gonna party like it's 1999!
as a web developer, im still having to deal with IE6 to ensure cross browser compatibility, and a little lost on the versioning now. how many shitface versions of ie out there that i have to test for x browser compatibility as of now ? 3 ? 5 ? 234,643 ? will it ever end ?
Read radical news here
"WebSlices give you an easy way to access frequently updated Web data, such as eBay listings or sections of a news-site page. When you hover the mouse over a content area on a page that supports this IE feature (...)"
Uh... And of course that's not something that completely goes in the opposite direction of standards, right? Making YET another thingy that only works in IE and requires specific code?
I guess I'll be waiting for IE10 before remotely thinking about the possibility of eventually using it very occasionally.
I think the point is more that if I lay out a page with tables ("Oh the humanity!") then I'm done. If I try and lay out a page with CSS, I have to lay it all out so it works, then create three different versions so that it renders in all the broken versions of IE, plus Safari and whatever else I want to support.
I'm sure that if you're getting paid by the hour, all that time spent doing browser-version tweaks is great. But for a lot of folks who don't want to bother with laying a page out three or four times, tables are fine.
As an aside, I'm not sure I get your point about maintainability. If I change the page layout, of course I'll have to create a new table structure. But I'm not clear on why this is inherently more difficult that creating a new CSS layout, and then doing all the browser-specific tweaks.
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