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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.
Will it prevent Sticky Keys from activating?
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.
Or, Put simply, "No matter how slow it is, at least it has Adblock"
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
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
Won't be released until Noon EST.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
And NoScript. And greasemonkey. And GMail Manager. And... The list goes on and on and on... Any one of my 'necessary' plugins makes Firefox more desirable than any other browser.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well, yes.
And don't forget NoScript.
The thing is, with Adblock and NoScript, browsing on Firefox *is* faster than on any other browser. A
Microsoft's New Browser Is Better, but Still Not Best
But Adblock, NoScript, and Flashblock cause noticeable speed-ups, especially if your Internet connection is lousy.
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
I heard about this great plugin that makes Firefox even faster. It's called "NoHTML." Apparently it breaks some websites tho...
Explain to me how Firefox is bloated. Compared to what? Its former self? Other browsers? The executable size of Firefox has been remarkable stable since version 1.0 --- it hovers around the 10MB mark. Just what is the bloat then? Nearly everything in Firefox has a direct browsing application. It is justified to call those features not bloat. The whole "SQLite database is bloat" argument goes out the window about 5 minutes after you start using the awesome bar. Bloat is one of those words that's easy to fling around. What would you get rid of? The plugin system? Look at the other replies to your comment. The crash manager? The tabbed browsing??? Firefox currently has its problems, but bloat is not one of them.
http://ieaddons.com/
Actually, IE has many, many plugins. You might even recognize some familiar names from Mozilla-land, eg. Foxmarks, StumbleUpon, Cooliris, ....
There are add-ins - http://www.ieaddons.com/en/ which is linked to from the IE8 home page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx
The article just basically got it wrong on that front.
You clicked the wrong bookmark... 4chan is the one with a 4 leaves clover.
"Bloated" is one of the most overused words on this site. It no longer has any meaning here, except as a generic insult. It's basically the equivalent of disagreeing with someone's opinion and calling them stupid. It's just something to say when you can't think of anything reasonable or intelligent.
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.
> 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).
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