IE 8 Beta – got it installed! and it’s quite impressive! – a Review

Today when I checked my unread feeds, I found ‘IE 8 Beta 1 for developers’ was out. I didn’t really have any idea whether to give it a try, because it’s just Beta 1.

After checking out the notable features introduced in IE 8 – WebSlice, AJAX navigation, Activites, Developer Toolbar, I couldn’t resist myself from trying it out. The installation was just about 14 MB and it also required an update (KB946501) to be installed my system, which itself was quite small.

As mentioned, the new features were quite impressive add-ons to the previous version.

WebSlice – monitoring just a part of a custom feed (not the entire feed as we do now). For this, the website should support the feature. i.e. from development. In the intro video, a custom build version eBay was demoed.

Ajax Navigations – A typical problem we face now a days when navigating thro a ajax enabled web pages is that the browsers will not able to allow you to navigate back and forth based on custom movements within the page, only based on the previous page (one with different URL).

Activities – is something which we used to see in previous versions as browser menu extensions, but now a distinctive feature as part of the browser. This helps in complete control over the menu extensions in a easier way.

Developer Tool bar – This is same as that of IE Developer Tool bar add-in, but doesn’t have complete functionality (IE8 being beta1 now). I need to try it out and see what has improved over previous release (or whats making it different from the previous one).

Apart from this listed features, there has been lot of talks about IE 8 Standards compliant feature. Yeah, IE8 has two modes built into it – Standards and Emulate IE7 modes. I still couldn’t figure out whenever a browser-level modification is required, why couldn’t IE do it without a browser restart. Some of other issues I could think of are

1. For ‘Allowing pop ups’, ‘Allow download’, ‘Allow Activex install’, the page is getting refreshed. Consider a Ajax enabled site, the refresh would need me to start over the entire process of downloading, etc. – I feel this can be avoided if the browser injects/ strips off the appropriate code that it initially stripped off/ injected. (there may be side effects?!?)

(I hope such things gets improved in the final release).

Does IE 8 break the web?

I thought I could list down the issues I faces so far and kept his list updated..

1. I haven’t come across any site that totally went haywire in IE8 mode yet. Let’s see.
2. But I did find my wordpress dashboard pages getting slower (the very page where I’m typing this blog post now), I had little trouble in opening the page in the first place (the page went blank once in a while, I had to keep on refreshing it again and again).
3. In Live Search, I’m not able to select the text in the search box if I click inside the whitespace of the search text box.
4. The post I wrote in wordpress using IE8 got published as a blank post. I ended up writing again in IE7 mode 😦
5. …

All these issues really doesn’t matter now because,

• This is just a developer release – meaning for web site build from now on to become standards compliant
• It’s still in beta 1, so let’s wait for the next or the final release

That’s my short review! I’m still exploring 🙂

Update: There is a note on ACID2 test on IE blog.