IE8 has emerged from beta, with the arrival of its first release candidate. The IE development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won’t say how long untill 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 its InPrivate browsing feature, compatibility view, and improved performance. The browser has also been made more secure, and it gives users convenient new ways to use web resources. IE8’s color-coded tab system, improved address bar, and enhanced privacy protections are noteworthy.
win xp sp3 and vista sp1:
so far uses about 25% less ram or so with 5+ tabs. (diminishing returns at 50+ tabs, but still usues less ram than 7).
pages render quicker, much quicker.
some people say Gmail isnt working right, but i haven’t had any issues with it.
How standards-compliant is it now when compared to past versions, as well as the competition? I hear the Opera 10 beta is getting a 100 score on Acid3. I’m not a web developer, but I have been lead to believe that this actually means something
Just wondering how IE8 is doing in this regard.
Edited 2009-01-26 23:08 UTC
IE8 was never inteneded to pass the Acid3 but indtead it’s focus was on the Acid2 (which it passes). IE8 gets a 20 on the Acid3 (a slight step up frmo the 14 it got with beta 2). Acid2 is the important one, 3 really hasnt come into play enough to worry about yet…
Edited 2009-01-26 23:22 UTC
I beg to differ.
Every browser rendering engine does better than 71/100 on Acid3 now (looking at stable releases)
IE gets 21/100.
Acid3 is very important in showing that however many improvements they’ve put in compared to IE 6&7, it still has a long way to go to reach parity.
Yes, Web developers can finally use a fuller range of CSS selectors on sites, and have fewer bugs to contend with. But beyond that, there is nothing* like SVG, Canvas, Video etc.
IE8 is going to hold us back for years.
*Shims exist. They are hacks.
“Acid2 is the important one, 3 really hasnt come into play enough to worry about yet… ”
What? If everyone would follow you, the web technologies would not evolve at all. Come on, Acid 2 was passed by all browsers except IE for years, this is a old thing, now for today’s web, this is Acid 3 which matters. I mean, Safari passed Acid 2 in 2005 and we are in 2009!!!! Please!!!
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html
And once again, IE is far behind regarding Acid 3 as it used to be with Acid 2. Safari 4 (beta) or Opera have been scoring 100 in Acid 3 for months already.
By the way,
IE WebSlices = Apple’s WebClip,
Again another idea stolen by Microsoft. Nice done Ballmer….. thank you Microsoft for your incredible sense of creativity.
I actually liked the IE7 look…however I found the UI rather unresponsive and went back to firefox after a couple of weeks. I don’t like it how the entire browser hangs every time I load a page. Get the feeling the IO is programmed in the GUI-thread.
Does IE8 have the same problem?
no this issue has been fixed in 8 (at least on the vista side, XP still slightly suffers from it but you can hardly notice, if at all)
Too little, too late.
Now Microsoft can’t rely upon IE marketshare being a given, and they’re having to compete.
This is hardly competing.
Still painfully slow to initialise. Slow loading pages. Slow Javascript. Completely lacks “teh Snappy” of Firefox 3 or Chrome.
Caught up with Acid 2 just as everybody else was done and moving on to the next thing.
– Still terrible Javascript 1.5 and DOM. No JS 1.7/1.8 like Firefox
– Proprietary Cross-XMLHTTPRequest, yet more “libraries” needed to hack around IE
– No SVG, no HTML5, *STILL NO XHTML+XML*
Not good enough MS, not good enough.
But the thing is, there is a lot of people who think because Microsoft made it, that it is better than everything else.
If it was called Microsoft Polished Turd v5, some people would still use it, because at the end of the day, they made the Windows system that it is running on, so they know how to make their own apps better than the competition can.. allegedly
Edited 2009-01-27 14:58 UTC