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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."
IE's primary function for me will still be as Firefox Downloader 8.0
Looks like a bunch of fluff. Not even anything about raw performance or memory footprint or standards compliance.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
[IE8 has] no add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon.
Never fear; I'm sure there will be plenty soon enough, and they will most likely install themselves! Check here to find out about new ones as they get released.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
Yes, thanks to the new javascript a-
Well, crap.
for the same reason it's been in the past: plugins. If you're looking for the best browser out of the box, it looks right now like Firefox may be in last place. It's bloated, has terrible memory management, and has fewer features, but plugins elevate to a level the other browsers wouldn't even want to reach.
Will it prevent Sticky Keys from activating?
What about all those third-party toolbars that proliferated for previous versions of IE? Surely they were built on some kind of extension support. Has it been removed?
According to Microsoft's own IE8 site, the current version of IE8 is RC1, not a final release. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx
Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night- Ginsber
1. Click this link: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ie8 ...
2. On the second search result, read the first line of the description.
3.
4. (Don't) profit!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
My first question with every new release of IE is, "How well does it render valid HTML+CSS?"
Yeah, I don't really care if it's fast and has "Web Accelerators". Will it display properly written pages properly? Are developers going to have to keep putting hacks into their pages to deal with IE quirks? If they aren't adhering to standards, then it's not really worth much.
This whole market thingy seems to work.
There is competition driven innovation, and a number of large companies are fighting for the market share.
I like it... although I doubt that my Ubuntu will run IE8, so I guess I won't use IE8 too much - perhaps I'll check it in Wine ;)
Cool as that seems in theory, doesn't automatically reloading the exact state that the tab was in when it crashed mean that it will probably just crash again as soon as you reload it?
You know that kid who rushes to the top of the hill, just knowing that he's finally going to win King of the Hill for the first time ever? Then when he gets to the top of the hill, he's elated when he realizes he's at the top... only to realize a few moments later that all the other kids ran up a different hill?
That's Microsoft.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I have this set up with widgets. It is useful to have certain snippets of web pages at ones fingertips. So I agree that it is a cool feature.
OTOH, implanting this in the browser seems like a serious security risk to me. How many times have we seen something like this used to steal someone's password to their bank account or otherwise make people believe they are on a secure site? How will they keep this feature from being hijacked?
In the end this sounds like feature bloat. It is not part of what MS said IE8 would be, which is a faster, more standards based browser.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page.
So it's a frame/iframe?
Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8
So it's RSS?
a niftier search bar,
Niftier search bar? What, did they include Clippy?
a more useful address bar,
How much more useful can one make an address bar? It's sole purpose is to provide a place to type in a web address. If by useful, do they mean that horrid Awesome Bar?
and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services.
Oh joy. Nothing like having your connection come to a crawl as some Flash advertisement tries to load in another page as it it's "delivered" to your system.
Ya know, there's something to be said for simplicity. But then, we are talking about developers who don't know the meaning of simplicity.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Microsoft's New Browser Is Better, but Still Not Best
It still fails Acid Test 3 horribly. Not as horribly as previous versions of IE but it still fails horribly. Also, the buttons still look like Windows 3.1.
This causes problems with IE8 since it is closer to being correct; these "fixes" throw it off. I am sure that sites will begin to change as IE8 use spreads. Until IE6 finally dies (still has 20% market share) though, I am saddened that the world is still suffer with IE hacks.
One bad thing, reverting back to IE7 is pretty much impossible in most cases.
Another, some old Active X controls do not work.
Ok, one more, they use an interconnected process model like Chrome so that the whole world does not crash when one bad page causes problems. Yeah, that is a great idea, but in my experience, it locks your whole machine and crashes every instance. Boo!
Good to see innovation is back in town. I won't be using IE anytime soon, at least not until there is a Linux or OS-X release of the browser. But I'm sure the Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc. developers are going to take a good hard look at those features, and we'll see the best innovations appear in other browsers really soon. And hopefully even more nifty functions inspired by this.
The last two, three years have seen more innovation in the browser than the ten years before that. FF 1 was nice and up to par - adding tabs but not that much more, FF 2 was a serious improvement, but only in FF 3 I start to see very serious changes and improvements - it starts to feel experimental at times - in an innovative way, something that I don't feel in FF 2. Is it because MS has picked up their pace in UI innovation? Is it because Google has launched Chrome with its super-javascript-engine? Or maybe because alternative Safari has gained mainstream recognition with its Windows version and the iPhone version? Or more likely all of the above?
Interesting times ahead, for sure. Very interesting times. And a lot of hard hard work for anyone involved in browser development to keep their brainchild on top. What a little competition can do! For once I will say: go, Microsoft, go, you're starting to do well in this. Just make sure you stick to the standards as otherwise you won't make it against the competition. The competition is too strong for that kind of tricks already.
First, a joke circa 1983: a hardware guy and a software guy (remember, this was 1983) take an HP Unix system to the roof of a 5 story building. They connect a long extension cord, boot it up, and throw it off the roof. There is a resounding crash and they rush down to see the results. "Wow!" shouts the hardware guy, "it's still running!" The software guy shrugs and says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX."
What's my point? It may be better than previous MSIE attempts, but it is still Microsoft, it's still IE, and it still only runs on Windows. As a web designer the rule is still: make it look right in Firefox, then unbreak it in MSIE{6,7,8}.
Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page.
Sounds like a *wonderful* malware delivery system.
Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8.
Yet another malware delivery system.
Why, in 2009, are they slapping on another layer of lard on top of their needlessly complex and largely ineffective OS security?
One thing is for sure, they aren't going to stop releasing dumb things like this so I'll never be out of work babysitting their products.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"...But for the actual browsing experience..."
Things like "browser experience" are so completely subjective as to have no meaning. The standard counters often include mentions of "general users" and other equally nonsensical strawmen. I don't mind people expressing opinions about their "browser experiences", in fact I think more people should talk about what they like and don't like. What I cringe at is when the difference between a review and opinion piece disappears, or becomes so ambiguous that it might as well be disappeared.
Yes, I know this is a dead horse, but even dead horses deserve a fresh flogging from time to time.
RFC2119
I'm not going to run windows just for "the best web browser." They want to resurrect the Mac IE port, I'm all for that - IE 5 for the Mac was the best browser on the platform until Mozilla came along.
It doesn't matter how "good" IE8 is - it's windows only, and Windows + Internet == Screaming Assrape. While I run windows at home and at work for non-Mac apps, I don't connect to the internet with my windows machines. I don't use samba (I use an SCP client which is slower but imo less of an asspain than windows networking), I don't download anything, and I damn sure don't install anything that didn't come from a vendor disk.
End result : exponentially fewer security problems than friends who run XP on their wintendos.
IE8 could give me winning lottery numbers and blow jobs... but I'm not running a web browser on Windows, ever. It's like having sex without a condom at an STD conference.
You clicked the wrong bookmark... 4chan is the one with a 4 leaves clover.
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.
So, being a web developer, the first thing I did after seeing this news was look for the standalone version of IE8, so that I can run it next to IE7 and test in both. No such luck. So I called their support line, and spoke to some guy in India with a fake American-sounding name, who told me that I couldn't run IE7 and IE8 at the same time. He's probably right, if you discount the Virtual PC option.
So can anyone out there point me at a free virtual PC image that runs IE7 or IE8 so that I can do my QA work? Or to a standalone version of IE8?
Thanks in advance.
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
> No data, just anecdotes
The problem is that actually measuring things gives different results... When Firefox 3 was measured head to head against other web browsers, it used less memory pretty consistently.
> Is browsing the web really so hard that it takes more memory and processing to do it
> than Eclipse and Outlook combined?
In a word, "maybe". Depends on the sites you're loading and what they do.
> It's using roughly twice what IE6 would use under the same circumstances.
You mean you've tried the same browsing pattern on the same sites and IE6 has 2x less memory usage? Or you have memories of how much IE6 used on some other set of pages some other time? Or something else?
> there's got to be a way to make it so that it's not the heaviest thing running on my
> machine
Not really, if it's the most heavily used app that has to do the most things... If you have 7 tabs worth of web applications open, then one would expect memory usage to be approximately equivalent to having 7 desktop applications open; if it's not, that's great.
Seriously, though, it's not uncommon for the browser to have to run several hundred kilobytes (no, I'm not making this up) of script when loading a web page. Let's take a simple example: http://www.cnn.com./ This has about 95KB of HTML (including inline scripts and such) and links to 270KB of external scripts. Those scripts do various stuff that creates objects and are generally poor at dropping object references. Which means that while the page is open, every object it's created will typically still be around: it can't be garbage collected, because the page is still referencing it.
This is not to say that memory usage can't be improved; it can be and people are working on it. Same for CPU usage. In particular, the "cpu being used all the time" thing is a serious problem that's being looked into. A lot of that is in fact Flash being stupid (easy to test how much by disabling Flash), but not all. But in the end, Firefox is not particularly more "bloated" than any other browser that does similar things in terms of web compat and rendering (yes, it's more memory-hungry than lynx, I agree).
This is nothing new (atleast for me).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Is this just fishing for page views? On what planet are they thinking the IE8 experience is better than any of the alternatives?
I've been using the IE8 builds at work since they released the beta. Sure, it's leaps and bounds better than IE7, which itself was better than IE6. But it still doesn't come close to Firefox or Chrome.
Even forgetting the extensions like AdBlock, IE's UI and rendering just feels sluggish after using Firefox or Chrome.
What is the crack they're smoking at computerworld?
Show me the IE equivalents of Adblock, Firebug and Greasemonkey.
1. "Detect MS Enemy"
2. "IfEnemy ScrewUpSiteLoad"
Examples:
A. Slashdot, the leading forum for Linux promotion
B. Google Gears Installed = IE8 hoses pages.
Wheee!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Really, when Microsoft PR gets posted on slashdot as blatantly as this, I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to offer Microsoft an editor position/seat at slashdot?
That way we'd know which articles to lend credibility to and which to add to adblocker.
So long as it's still got ActiveX in there, I gotta consider it "not acceptable".
Reading the article, it reads more like "Welcome to the 21'st Century Microsoft - you're doing *so* much better than you were . . ."
There are some nice features - that I have already via firefox extensions (colored tabs).
There are some buggy features that I don't particularly see the point of (What exactly does webslices do that RSS doesn't?)
And the security is, supposedly, finally up to what I expect from any other browser five years ago. One hopes.
So we have a bunch of features, most of which belong in extensionspace, a number of them buggy, and some of them we're frankly accepting Microsoft's word that they're vastly improved, and this is referred to as 'Leapfrogging'.
Kinda like how my Mom was so proud of me when I was seven and she actually started having to pay attention when we played chess, except I don't have that emotional investment in Microsoft.
Okey dokey then.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media