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Look Out, Firefox 3 — IE8 Is Back On Top For Now
CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla reviewed it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode,' new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. There's one big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."
Accelerators and Web Slices both sound like they are big gaping security holes waiting to be exploited.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Add-ins are the "killer app" of the browser for me. I don't think I'll ever switch from Firefox if competing browsers don't have this feature built into it. I just couldn't live without stuff like foxmarks, flagfox, customisegoogle, etc..
Yeah, IE8 can render pages faster but who really cares when pages render in a matter of seconds in any of the browsers on the market. 1 or 2 second difference means nothing to me. Add-ins mean alot to me and are the defining feature and without them it makes IE an inferior browser to Firefox.
I am not a linux/firefox fanboy, so I am going to assess this browser fairly and try to answer a few questions brought up on this thread. Since I am probably the only user here running Windows by choice, so I consider this a duty. Furthermore, I am an Opera user, so my expectations for speed and performance are totally insane and unreasonable.
First off, what's wrong:
* I am using IE 8 to write this comment and I am already missing my integrated spel chekkar.
* All the fun browser hacks I use to test new browsers are not working still, so the standards support of this release is the same as before. Of course, you won't see too much upper level DOM and advanced CSS on the part of web people actually use.
* The tabs seem to open really slow, but I believe it is actually process isolating its tabs now. The memory use per tab is about 10-30 mb, which is around if not slightly below where Chrome is on this system.
* Acid 3: 12/100
What's right:
* The page loads are brutally fast- faster than Opera 10 in some cases. For instance, MSNBC and BBC News, two of my favorite sites pop up at crazy speed. However, Slashdot --which is specifically engineered to run poorly on every new release of IE (it's very firefox-quirky)-- comes up quite slowly. When I first saw the page load charts that Microsoft put out, my first response was that there was a good reason Opera wasn't on that chart- but IE did a fantastic job of playing to the most popular websites. Keep this in mind if you are either a facebook user or stalking your kids on facebook.
* If you only use IE to download firefox, you will be happy to know that the mozilla webpage loads faster on IE than any other browser, firefox included.
Conclusion:
The overall interface of the browser is quite nice. If you're used to using Firefox, this is actually much faster and handles its memory better and such. However, Firefox is not a particularly fast or well designed browser. The interface will feel sluggish if you're used to Opera or Chrome. As an Opera user, my idea of browsing the web involves launching through pages at break-neck speed middle-clicking links as I go along and loading about 20-30 tabs at a time. I have a feeling my computer would explode if I did that with IE 8. However, the same could be said for Firefox 3.
The article is quite correct in saying that this browser is very fast and correct for the real web which most people browse- and that's something that should be noted. It seems as though Firefox has gotten so obsessed with javascript benchmarks and other such fluff that it's let its real world performance slide to the extent that it's now being challenged by IE.
Since IE is still totally unchallenged by other browsers in terms of enterprise features like advanced group policy, this new release of IE will simply mean that browsing the web at work/school will be a lot less lame and obnoxious... but considering the state of the economy, you should be all be working very very hard right now.
If you have any questions or challenges for IE 8 and don't run windows or ie 8, let me know and I will give you the results.
I tried the new Chrome 2 Beta which might not be what you're talking about. Definitely not ready for primetime by any means. Slow, clunky feeling, didn't load pages properly, etc. The old Chrome seems okay, except it has a problem rendering popular social networking sites.
Firefox's memory usage, test shows, is 1/2 that of Chrome or IE 8 with the same 10 tabs open. It has plugins, cooler themes, is very fast, configurable. So if by "better" you mean "faster"...Chrome 1 is pretty quick as long as you don't mind rendering issues. IE 7 I guess I need to disable completely the Phishing feature instead of just Turn it Off because the browser still waits to load pages as if it's considering whether it meets the MS standard of acceptable surfing.
Firefox works. Works well.
I may dislike IE8 for a lot of reasons but I would not be so quick to pin this one on IE8. The slashdot code base is HORRIBLE. Just look at the html that is being written, I have had problems with this site in konqueror at various times, webkit and opera. Mostly I think they just hack this site until it works in IE6,7 and Firefox and then call it done and don't worry about all the simple bugs in it that should be fixed that would make it work in far more browers.
Actually I even started blocking some of the javascript on the page because it was slowing it down so much. Sometimes up to 3 seconds before the page would draw because it was waiting on one of those javascript tracking scripts.
Slashdot is definitely not an example of a remotely well written site. Just test that yourself and validate it.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!