Internet Explorer 8 Beta Released & Reviewed

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Internet Explorer 8So Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 to the public the other day. Press releases and documents on the IE 8 site contain plenty of exciting promises of improved features, such as:

It all sounds very promising, but if you’re hoping that IE 8 Beta 1 will catch up with other contemporary browsers, you’d better lower your expectations! I had high hopes after reading about the new features and improved support for web standards, but I can’t expect Microsoft to do anything but fail horribly. It’s been a growing trend for this power hungry company.

Yeah I know. It’s a BETA version, so bugs and problems are to be expected. I still thought IE 8 Beta 1 would be more polished than it is, or atleast better then it’s other disaster sister, IE 7. Anyway, here are some of the areas I started poking around in.

CSS 2.1

Microsoft have made it clear that they aren’t done with the CSS 2.1 implementation yet and that there is much more to come in Beta 2, so things will improve. However, sites continue to break, and problems are occuring. Full CSS 2.1 support is very, very promising though, so I really hope the IE team manages to fulfill this promise.

Built-in developer tools

Unfortunately IE 8’s developer tools are currently very lacking in features, look unpolished, and seem quite buggy. They don’t come anywhere close to it’s rival, Firebug. Like CSS 2.1 support, Microsoft is open about the developer tools not being finished, so they will hopefully be much improved in the next release.

Zoom

Since IE 8 still refuses to resize text sized in pixels, zoom functionality is very important for people who need larger text on their screen. Zooming in IE 7 is ugly, and it is supposed to be improved in IE 8.

It’s a shame they couldn’t fix this. Zooming seems to have even more problems then it did in IE 7. After testing the function out on a few sites, I noticed this tool would single handily destroy pages and layouts. Zoom needs more work, or if you ask me, completely forgotten about.

Looking forward to Beta 2

I’m really looking forward to how Microsoft can fail to amaze me in Beta 2. It would be extraordinary if Microsoft actually followed through with what their plains entailed. Hope you guys can impress me on the next pitch, because strike 1 came really fast!

March 7, 2008 | Filed Under Windows, Web Browsers

 

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