When it comes to web-based technologies, we here at Switch On The Code always try to stay on top of things. When Microsoft announced IE8, I took no time at all downloading, installing, and playing with it. I haven't used every new feature yet, but here's a rundown of my first impressions of the new browser.
Installing
The installation process was nearly identical to IE7. No surprise here, being a beta I wouldn't expect them to create a fresh new installer before it's released.
Overall the download and install process took less than 5 minutes. If you're interested in getting the beta, it can be downloaded from here. What did surprise me, especially being on a Vista computer, was the restart recommendation after the installation was complete. I thought the days of restarting Windows was long behind us - at least for software released by Microsoft. I'll let this one slide for now, but only because it's in beta.
First Launch
The first thing you have to do after launching IE8 is choose some settings. I chose to just use their "express settings". What really surprised me was that Microsoft chose Google as the default search provided instead of Live Search.
The next screen I was presented with gave me the ability to import settings from other browsers. I use Firefox as my daily browser, so I chose to import settings from that. I was disappointed that the links on my Firefox link bar were not transferred over to IE8.
Look and Feel
Not surprisingly, IE8 looks and feels almost exactly like IE7. I always thought IE7 could have used a little UI work, which I hope will make it's way into future versions of IE8.
The first thing that immediately stood out was the "Emulate IE7" button - maybe because there's a giant arrow pointing to it on the default home page.
This button apparently sends the browser back to IE7 mode, which didn't really work as well as I'd hoped. I'll talk about this more in the next section.
Rendering Quality
I'm going to be honest, this is actually when I stopped using IE8. It could be that IE8 is so standards compliant that no website looks right, or maybe it just has some kinks to work out. Let's start with a simple test, how does our blog look?
We use Wordpress, and while I'm not saying it's the epitome of HTML perfection, it's not that bad. Needless to say, IE8 doesn't score too highly on this test. The next site I chose was Gaming Textures. Having helped develop it, I can tell you that all of the standard browsers can render it (I remember doing the testing). It's the first website I went to on the iPhone - and was surprised to see how well it worked. IE8, on the other hand, not so much.
There's a lot on Gaming Textures I can forgive IE8 for getting wrong, but how in the world does Google make an ad that doesn't look the same in every browser? It won't. A Google ad not looking correct, in my mind, can only be blamed on the browser. I mean, they're Google.
Do you remember me saying I wasn't very happy with the emulate IE7 button? Well it turns out Gaming Textures didn't quite work in IE7 mode either. We did pretty extensive testing under IE6 and IE7 before launching it, so I know it does work under the real IE 7.
The tree is supposed to have blue lines connecting nodes - as seen in the Firefox version. But, IE8 (in IE7 emulation mode) didn't render the lines.
Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed by IE8's ability to render websites. Even huge sites like Digg and Ars Technica has some minor layout problems. My favorite buggy page was Reddit. You'd figure a simple text-based layout like theirs would work on any browser, but it was stuck with a permanent horizontal scroll bar.
Other Features
IE8 comes with a bunch of stuff like Facebook and Ebay integration, but frankly I don't give a crap about stuff like that. It has a really weird feature that grays out everything but the domain name on your URL bar. Maybe IE7 had that feature, but I don't remember it.
My only hope is that an engineer didn't spend too much time on this feature, because there are way more important things to work on. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly use the developer tools but at first glance they look to be very good. When we get a chance to use it more, we'll post a full review.
I was a little surprised to see the lack of a real-time spell checker. In my opinion, this is the single most important feature IE8 has to have - aside from the ability to view web sites.
We can't complain too much about IE8. It's still in beta and I'm just glad Microsoft isn't sitting idly by while Firefox continues to take away their market share. With Firefox 3 just around the corner and IE8 showing some headway, it's definitely an exciting time in the browser world.
03/10/2008 - 07:36
The highlighted domain name in the URL with everything else grayed out is a security feature. Too often URLs are spoofed to look like a real site. This will help the user verify they are actually on the site they think they are on. Internet Explorer (and probably other browsers) use the @ sign to let you embed user names and passwords directly into the URL. Example:
http://username:password@www.website.com/
Well some people will use this feature to hide a real website's URL:
http://www.usatoday.com/news.html?article=123@10.2.3.123
Notice at the end there is an @ followed by an IP address? The user would actually go to that IP instead of usatoday.com. To most Internet user they would assume they are on usatoday.com
This is done A LOT for sites such as paypal.com, so that people can make their fake site look like paypal.com and gather people's user names and passwords. With the domain name highlighted in the address bar that IP address would highlight instead of usatoday.com and thus make it easy for the user to see that the site is a fake.
03/10/2008 - 08:47
Thanks for the explanation, Billkamm.