IE8 Beta, Ugh.
I’m usually a fan of IE (What, did someone just admit to that??), in fact, my primary browser on my Windows machine is not Firefox, but IE7, which I’ve used and has perfectly suited my needs since the first beta. Actually, I liked the first beta a lot more than the final release, so when I found out that Microsoft released beta 1 for IE8 I immediately went to download it. In retrospect, I should have did a little research first (there’s actually little information on IE8 right now), maybe I would have found out that:
- IE8 completely overwrites IE7 just like IE7 did with IE6. At least this time you can roll back, but you’d figure by now they’d have learned the simple software development principle of allowing applications to co-exist on a system. This is especially necessary when developers need to switch back and forth to compare and contrast behaviour.
- IE8 replaces the very simple concept described in (1) with an "IE7 emulation" mode. Unfortunately, "IE7 emulation" mode only emulates browser rendering, not the horrible UI issues. In addition to that, switching between IE7 emulation mode requires the browser (and all other windows!) to be completely restarted. Now all developers need to do to see changes in behaviour is:
- Navigate to their website in IE7 emulation mode
- Switch IE7 emulation mode off
- Close the browser
- Open the browser
- Navigate to the website again
- Check & attempt to solve differences
- Switch IE7 emulation mode back on
- Close the browser
- Open the browser
- Navigate to the website again
- Make sure your solution didn’t break IE7
And don’t even try to view them side by side– no, that would be too easy. What a great idea, Microsoft.
- IE8 introduces the concept of "Activities" and "Slices". It lets you highlight text and perform a bunch of common tasks like searching (on Live) and mapping (on Live) by right clicking. Now I know this is Microsoft, but where the hell is Google Maps? You know, that better mapping website that pre-dates yours? These features are nice in theory, but everything here is so monopolistically targetted to their services only– meaning normal people get nothing out of it. Hopefully they add normal sites by the final release. Usually I would wait until the final to whine about third party functionality, but for some reason I don’t see this ever working with anything I actually use. And no, a Facebook search activity does not count.
- IE8 "standards" completely break even the most basic of pages. I’m talking oldschool tabular layouts, and the part that broke was the layout. How do you break that stuff?
- The horizontal scrollbar bar shows up on almost every single page. How the hell did a dead obvious bug like that get all the way to the beta?
- Why do domain names show up in bold in the address bar and the rest of the equally important URL is grayed out? Since when is the only important part of a URL the domain name? I’m not even sure what the UI purpose of that is…
- How do I disable Activities & Slices? I don’t want to see useless information in my popup menu and an even more useless popup button whenever I highlight text. I’ll assume it’s buried somewhere in the options… I see they’ve done no work to improve the horrible preferences dialog.
I’m not even going to talk about the standards (besides #4). The web development community has sufficiently hated on IE’s implementation of standards and there’s nothing left to say. I don’t necessarily share those opinions, but I also don’t care. When a non-developer visits your website they don’t care that you correctly implemented the CSS2.1 spec or that your XHTML validates and you have a graphic to prove it– they just want it to look normal. The second normal sites stop looking normal (#4) is when you’ve messed up and need to fix it.
All in all I’m pretty disappointed. Remember, I’m an IE user, and just listen to how pissed I sound. Needless to say I used the benefit of the rollback to IE7.
This beta makes me want to start using Safari or something. Don’t people make browsers to download and render webpages anymore? I don’t need Activities, I don’t need Slices, I don’t need Download Managers or Favourite Tagging Blogosphere Viewing Youtube Integration. I don’t even need tabs! Just render my damn HTML.
