I didn’t think the day would ever come, but it has: as of the RC1 build, Internet Explorer 8 appears to render TR pretty much flawlessly without IE-specific code enabled. That’s quite a radical improvement over the beta 2 release that came out five short months ago.
Regulars will recall my successive rants about the first and second IE8 beta releases, in which the new "standards-compliant" rendering engine tripped and stumbled on every other website (including TR). I dreaded the prospect of having to pull up my sleeves and write workarounds for yet another IE release, and to my frustration, the IE team seemed busier implementing peripheral features than fixing rendering bugs.
Somehow, though, they’ve pulled it off. IE8 RC1 behaves just as well on TR as on CNN, Google Maps, YouTube, and Facebook. What impresses me most is that this release can take the exact same code I feed to Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera without skipping a beat. In both IE7 and IE6, I’m forced to resort to a handful of browser-specific hacks to sidestep rendering bugs.
That said, IE8 might still be trailing Gecko and WebKit a little bit. While Firefox, Chrome, and IE8 all render the Acid2 test successfully, IE8 scores considerably lower in the Acid3 test. Even performance seems a little lackluster: in my Windows XP virtual machine, Chrome completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark almost four times quicker than IE8. I haven’t tested the new release candidate on Vista, however, so I’ll refrain from drawing any hasty conclusions.
What’s important is that the IE team managed to produce a browser that’s reasonably standards-compliant. That might not matter too much now, but it’ll be a big deal in a few years when IE6 and IE7 market shares drop near zero. I expect a decent chunk of IE7 users will make the jump, too, since IE8 has a similar interface and works on the same versions of Windows, but it brings a (vast) number of neat new features. Hopefully, Microsoft will push out IE8 on Windows Update a few months after the browser goes gold.
Does IE8 have what it takes to replace Firefox, Chrome, and Opera in the hearts of enthusiasts? I don’t believe so. However, IE8 now looks like a clear step up from IE7, and that’s a good thing for the next major release of the most popular browser out there.
IE8 is total craaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!!!!!!!!!!!!
I installed it on Vista64bit and XP sp3 and it crashed every time I used, so I throwed it to the BIN.
I’m browser mad guy tried all of the browsers up to date. Google Chrome is the champion, it only need more addons.
As much as I respect Google advertising bots who joined the site 30 minutes ago (literally), I must say you’re talking rubbish.
I’m neither google bot nor anti MS, I’m TR reader quite long, Have use TR system building guide to build my first PC 16 months ago.
My opinion about IE8 based on my experience, I even cant download W7 beta with IE8, when tried FF all done, hassle free.
Curious, because I couldn’t do it with either, so I resorted to the old trusty Pirate Bay, then used the key Microsoft gave me. All the same.
#23,
Yes, Win2K is 9 years old but it’s enough for the computing needs of a sizeable number of users who don’t watch HD videos, play 3D games or create multimedia content. I mean, a used PIII with 256 MB of RAM is fine for checking your Windows Live account, doing a little browsing and using Office 2000
I should have mentioned that I live in a 3rd world country, so people think twice or thrice before upgrading to a newer PC.
#32,
What’s lacking on IE8 is Java*[
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