Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 First Impressions

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IE8 Beta 1 was released to the general public yesterday and here are my first impressions and quick review. I’ve installed it and taken it for a quick whistle-stop tour of the web. It’s stable, it’s a great improvement, but one caveat though, it’s only really intended for developers and designers at this stage, so if that’s not you, read on but don’t install it.

[Update: IE8 overwrites IE7, see the comments below for information on how to run different versions of internet explorer 6, 7, and 8 on the same machine using Virtual PC. It's all free of charge from Microsoft. I'll write up a post about how to do this next Friday.]

Feet First into IE8

Installing such early Betas isn’t always such a great idea and Microsoft have in the past had a reputation for not enabling different versions of products to co-exist. So why such as rash step?

Well, primarily I was just very impressed by what Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team had to say in his keynote at Mix 08 and I wanted to see the browser for myself.

Secondly, I don’t use Internet Explorer as my default browser any more. Therefore I’m not reliant on it for web browsing or accessing any web applications. Most of the time I just use it for testing client web sites.

And thirdly, (and this is why I’m going to keep it on my machine) I liked the fact that Microsoft seem to have solved the multiple version problem by enabling you to toggle between IE8 and IE7 emulation mode.

IE7 Emulation Mode

This last point means that developers can continue to do real world client site testing in IE7 at the flick of a switch. Switch of IE7 emulation and you can still continue testing and preparing for the release of IE8. This is a very nice feature and makes the life of developers much easier.

Previously, developers required a virtual machine to run IE6 and IE7 so you had to log in to the virtual machine to use and test in IE6. You still need to restart the browser each time you want to switch between IE8 and IE7 emulation, mode but that’s no real hardship.

IE8 Is Focussed On Developers

Developers were really the focus of Dean Hachamovitch’s speech yesterday. That’s not surprising, as MIX is a developers conference, but it really feels like IE8 will affect developers most. He summed it up nicely by saying that developers have to spend so much of their time and effort on ensuring that things work across different browsers that it detracts from the quality of the final outcome.

So What’s New In IE8 for Developers?

So what have Microsoft done in IE8 that will make life easier for developers? They’ve reduced the gap between what features the major browsers can and cannot implement.

Microsoft are going to implement CSS 2.1 and ensure that IE8 always renders sites in the most standards compliant way possible. That will give back so much time from fixing CSS quirks related to floats, margins and padding etc.

They are also starting to implement elements of HTML5 which will enable the back button on a browser to revert to the last “state” of an AJAX enabled page (what users expect) rather than going back to the previous page. Also new from the HTML5 stable is the ability to of the browser to use local storage.

The example of local storage given in the keynote was very slick. He started to create a blog post and while doing so pulled the network cable out of his computer. The application detected this, notified him of the fact that he was not longer connected and changed the “Post” button to “Save” i.e. his blog started to function locally so that he would not lose his work due to connection problems.

There is also a new set of developer tools that seem to be close to Firebug and may even go beyond Firebug’s present capabilities, though I’ve not looked to closely at that yet.

Now these types of things are already available in other browsers, but we now have more of a level playing field and it’s easier to guarantee certain features being available in the browser.

But What About The Users?

If you already use IE7, IE8 won’t be that much of a big surprise. They’ve moved the favourites buttons to a better position and things like clearing your cache are a lot better. There’s also a nice touch of highlighting the domain name of a URL and making the rest of the URL less prominent. I guess this has positive security implications as it can will show people where they really are if they happen to have opened a link in a dodgy phishing email.

The image below shows which part of the URL is highlighted (my screen capture software decided to ignore the highlighting) and the new position of the favourites.

he two main things Microsoft are focussing on at what they call Activities and WebSlices.

Activities are essentially context sensitive actions that you can perform on sections of a web page. So if you highlight an address on a web site and right click, on of the available Activities is to view a map for that address. The big change for the user is that they don’t actually have to leave the page or open a new tab, the map just opens as a small box on the page itself and you can drag the map around , zoom in etc just as you’d expect. To create an Activity, developers just create an XML file that describes what data is required to return information back to the page and how to supply it.

WebSlices are kind of like microformats in that you simply mark up a particular section of a page with some class names and IE8 will recognise these as a WebSlice. You can then subscribe to that particular section of the page, a kind of mini RSS and watch for changes. The example that they give is watching for changes on an Ebay item. WebSlices appear in your favourites.

All of this just reinforces the importance of the browser in modern society and how the browser affects the choices we make. The pre-installed Activities will of course favour Microsoft’s own services such as Live Maps and most people will go with the default behaviours.

Google Maps Breaks : (

In my quick tour of the sites I commonly use, I found that IE8 rendered most sites pretty well with one glaring exception. IE8 really doesn’t like Google Maps. But if you’re a developer then you probably use Firefox most of the time anyway so things like this don’t matter too much and are to be expected in a Beta release.

So take IE8 for a spin and let’s look forward to finding out exactly how Microsoft intend to rid the world of IE6.

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Filed under Reviews, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice

Tags: activities, css2.1, HTML 5, ie8, ie8 review, internet explorer, internet explorer 8, microformats, webslices