I won’t say it’s “finally” coming, because it might be one of Internet Explorer’s fastest major upgrades. But IE8 is coming, and better yet, I think it is “finally” catching up with the competition.
The news is all over the place, and this time I won’t dig into the tech like I did with the IE7 beta. I have installed the developer beta for a little testing, and it looks pretty similar to IE7. Since the UI isn’t changing much, I think it’s a comparatively developer-heavy release (yum!).
Here are some good official links:
And the interesting progress & commentary:
- IE8 passes Acid2 test (Acid2 is a CSS Rendering test)
- IE Team says IE8 will have to opt-in to its own new standards-support, and then changes their minds (hooray!)
- Ajaxian on IE 8: Better Ajax, CSS, DOM, and new features
- John Resig (JQuery) applauds IE8’s great Javascript (and other) progress
My own/other thoughts:
New Direction: A lot of the most interesting new stuff is neither UI/security improvements nor core web technology improvements, but Web 2.0-type stuff like Activities and WebSlices which seem to be targeting easier mashups and 3rd-party browser extensions.
Bad Chrome: A later IE7 release added back the Classic file menu. Now they’ve added the crap links bar back in, sacrificing that much more viewport to the biggest waste of browser chrome. Those plus the infobar warning I got right away doubles the 3 rows it should be, meaning if it goes live this way, my various inattentive relatives are gonna be scrolling way too much:
Developer’s Browser Ecosystem: IE7 usage is still roughly even with IE6, and seems to have leveled off. It’s frustrating that IE6 is still hanging on so much. Let’s get IE8 in and IE6 gone!