Like it or loathe it, a new release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is upon us once again. For this eighth iteration of their browser, they are focusing heavily on security, ease of use and improvements in RSS, AJAX and CSS. That's a rather general outline, so we’ll dive into these new features for a closer look.
Acid3 Fail!
Despite reporting a 100 score on the Acid2 test months ago, IE8 has subsequently registered a sloppy 20/100 on the Acid3 test. Compare that to these recent scores:
- Firefox 3.1 : 89
- Safari 4 : 100
- Opera 10 : 100
- Chrome 1.0 : 71
- When I was looking something up on Live Search Maps, it also suggested that I might want to check out Virtual Earth and Yahoo Maps.
- When I was checking my old Windows Live Mail account it suggested that I may like Yahoo and Hotmail.
- When I was on Engadget it said I may like Gizmodo and Digg.
- I installed a Digg Web Slice and it allows me to see the top 10 articles without having to visit the actual site in a new tab.
- A great example is what eBay have done. Instead of keeping a whole tab open just to keep an eye on the highest bid on that camera you've had your eye on, you simply create a web slice and it will stay in your favorites bar. When you want to see the auction, you click and it will show you a nice, live window of your auction.
- Subscribe to the NETTUTS RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.
In fact, many users are reporting scores as low as twelve. This is shocking to say the least. For those unfamiliar with the acid tests:
“Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript.”
– Wikipedia
Reclaim your Privacy with InPrivate
The first on our little list of new features in IE8 is InPrivate. As its name might suggest, it is a feature similar to the Incognito mode in Google's Chrome or many of the Firefox extensions that add stealth mode functionality. When this mode is activated it stops Internet Explorer from storing your browsing session. It stops storing your history, cookies, temporary Internet files, form information and any passwords you may have entered. When you disable the InPrivate mode there is no record of your private browsing session. This is a great mode to use when searching for gifts, banking on-line, or other private things.
Suggested Sites
Next, we have “Suggested Sites”; think of it as a kind-of built in Stumble Upon – almost. It's not enabled by default and is turned off during your InPrivate session. Essentially, it sends information back to Microsoft about the sites you visit. Microsoft then returns suggested sites to you that you might find interesting.
Though this could impose upon your privacy, Microsoft have stated that the suggested sites are per-session and that anything that would make the client, you, identifiable aren't logged. The suggested sites feature worked well and showed me sites that were in the same niche as I was interested in.
You get the idea; it works pretty well at expanding your “internet horizon”.
Increase Your Browsing Speed with Accelerators
One of the bigger features which has gotten many people interested in IE8 is the accelerators. An accelerator is an action that is performed when you highlight a particular piece of text on a web page. Just as the name suggests, it's supposed to speed up some of the mundane tasks we perform – like looking up something on Wikipedia, translating text to a different language, emailing a small excerpt of a site to a friend, and even posting to Twitter. These can all be performed very easily with some of the built-in accelerators, as well as the newly launched Add-ons site which hosts many more.
When I tried the accelerators, they worked well and helped quite a bit. It takes a little getting used to as, rather than highlighting the word and right-clicking to bring up a menu, you click on a little blue box that appears to access the different accelerators you have installed. However, once you get into the groove, it can become quite powerful.
Slice and Dice With Web Slices
Think of web slices as a kind of RSS feed – but they actually display a small portion of the site rather than just text. For example:
It's a nice little feature, and will be interesting to see what different sites can come up with to take advantage of them.
Web Slices also auto-update – like an RSS feed – and when there is an update, the text is displayed as bold on the Favorites bar. It doesn't appear as if there are many slices available at the moment, but it should catch on soon enough.
SmartScreen
The SmartScreen isn't really a new feature but more of an evolution of the phishing filter technology that Microsoft introduced in version 7. Like Firefox, if a website has been reported as harmful or an impostor, a message will appear warning the user that the site has been reported as harmful and the user really shouldn't visit it.
It's great to see Microsoft evolving its security technology in Internet Explorer. I'm guessing a majority of users won't understand phishing and this filter will hopefully save a lot of people from entering their PayPal details into an impostor site.
It's What's Under the Hood that Counts
These are some of the bigger and more apparent features that are included in the latest version of IE, but there are many new, less obvious, features that are working in the background. One of the things I really like in the new IE is how they've taken a path similar to Google's Chrome with their sandbox implementation.
This means that each tab running in the browser creates its own process within Windows and if a page crashes, the entire browser won’t be taken down with it. If the entire browser was to crash though, there is also a new tool which allows you to choose which tabs you want to recover. So if you knew a particularly heavy Flash site was causing the problem, you could simply choose not to recover the troublesome site.
Tab Coloring
There have also been some small, but welcomed changes to the organization of tabs. Say you are visiting eBay and you click a link which opens a new tab; IE8 will know that the new tab is related to the site that opened it. So it will color both the tabs the same. Another subtle change is that, like Chrome, the address of the site is now colored; the domain such as Envato.com is a solid black color while the rest of the address is a light gray color. Chalk this update to improving security as it helps you to identify the real site, as opposed to one that is using some sub-domain trickery.
Sites Not Ready for IE8? Use Compatibility Mode
There has been a push to improve the performance of the HTML parser, CSS engine and JScript run time. As well as performance there has also been a push to improve the rendering of content authored to web standards. In order to ease the transition from IE7 to IE8, Microsoft has created a meta element which when used in a website causes IE8 to run in a compatibility mode and render the page as if it was running in Internet Explorer 7. This will allow a little more time to ensure that a site is ready for IE8.
Developer Debugger
On the developer side of things, Microsoft has also included a debugger for CSS, HTML and Javascript. It's not as nice as the likes of the Firefox extension, Firebug, but it gets the job done and lets you see what's going on underneath the glossy exterior.
Internet Explorer 8 is a welcomed update, and it's nice to see how Microsoft has improved their standards implementation – somewhat.
What issues have you had with this browser? Have your current sites broken? Which feature are you happiest with?
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
Join our newsletter!
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Nettuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Even if IE8 is better than the previous, IE7 and below are still alive because people dont bother to upgrade, they should somehow have something that automatically kills previous versions from IE and install the new one.
Exactly, that’s what I always think. The Apple have a upgrade software that warns you when there’s a new upgrade of one of the programs. Why Microsoft doens’t try to develop one for the IE? If something inside Windows doens’t allow, try to change it on the next Windows, right? It would be great!
I always find my layouts…not working in any EI browser as it works in Opera or Firefox. Usually padding/margins come into play as far as something going wrong is concerned. I find using extra divs instead of padding/margins will sometimes fix the problem.
Building great products is about pleasing the user and in my opinion, it would do good to learn the IE way. Not because it won’t suck (it probably will…), but because there are a percentage of people who do still use this browser.
Obviously aim your efforts towards Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox…surely EI isn’t the majority over four popular browsers. But still…for people who don’t know jack about computers and mainly want to surf the web, IE is a big choice because it comes with Windows automatically.
Creating a beautiful experience for the end user is the greatest thing in the world, even if it means having the nerves of steal to deal with ridiculous IE releases.
Whats the point of an operating system if it doesn’t come with a web browser? Apple does it and in-fact they also installed safari on our machines even without our consent just because you have that Apple App Update when you installed Itunes but no one complains…. If Microsoft ever does that the Crazy Europeans will fine them $100B
If Microsoft would follow W3C’s standards instead of trying to make their one the web would be a better place.. Every other browser follows these and you can design a website that will render perfectly in all of these and then look at it in IE and have it fall to pieces.. I hate having to make specific rules for IE7 and the horrible transparency of PNG’s for IE6.. There shouldn’t have to be hacks for css and now with IE8 we are going to have to make certain rules for IE6, 7 and 8 thus making the web very inconvenient for designers… Do I seriously have to do 3 extra things on every page I design to make it IE friendly?
IE8 has what something like….1-2% market share? Hardly worth losing sleep over.
Think externally, not internally.
The web isn’t going to become what you want (a MS free existence). Hate to break it to you. It’s like the people that have a gripe with MySQL, and want it to vanish in favor of PostGRE.
A majority of the internet are all using IE. Not anyone here most likely, but the average mom and pop, sisters, grandmothers. It isn’t going away.
The best we can do as developers is work with it, and expect it to get better. Commenting on the IE dev blogs may also help.
On the upside, you can stop worrying about IE6 I suppose.
IE6 is “teh” devil. Let’s not mourn it’s death.
is it me or is nettuts.com over taking psdtuts.com in the rankings?
IE8 does indeed render strict coded sites correctly. And that’s what we talked about all the years, isn’t it? And MS listened to our requests.
Moreover, what is most important: it does render MY website correctly :)
The cleartype of texts looks really good. Compare this to Firefox!
And by the way: We are complaining about IE8′s acid tests but have you ever taken a look about what Adobes Dreamweaver CS 4 is coding for s***? This has really nothing to do with html.
I hope the next generation of browsers will be a nightmare for DW-layouters.
Still using the CS3. But I have used the CS4 and there’s nothing that I’d complain.
I hate IE but I hope the Microsoft wake up and make a great IE next time. Can’t wait to see if this will happen in IE9.
I can’t stand people relying on Dreamweaver to tell them how their HTML will look. Just use browsers and a local testing server!
IE aint that bad, pretty cool actually. Alot faster than Firefox but obviously not as powerful.
I have chosen to not use Microsoft products and my life has been much better for it. I see no reason to use this browser when there are many other great alternatives. Microsoft has let me down too many times in the past, I’m not going back. The internet is moving very fast and large slow moving corps cannot keep up. I don’t think any company that has a very slow moving old school philosophy will be successful on the internet. Microsoft has clearly not made a successful transition to the web or web technologies. “Think Different” seems to be the cry of this new generation. Good Ridden MS
Explain that to your clients and their customers when doing their website.
Oh right… its illogical.
Just go for Opera… Everyone!
I’ve found it’s just easier to write an entirely different stylesheet for IE browsers. However I don’t spend nearly as much effort on this one. Usually my stylesheet for IE browsers are as minimal as I can get them, even if it means people on updated browsers see an entirely different site.
I’ve given up on being polite and subtle about getting people to switch to an updated browser. IE6 has been around since 2001… if you haven’t switched by now, you don’t deserve to see what’s going on in 2009. Unfortunately, clients don’t always share my same sentiment..
Because they are paying you to create their website and not be an idealist?
I wish they would just give up! I mean come on at least transfer to webkit! And then put the crappy features on top!
i’ve tried the beta and in my opinion at that time it was the best version of IE ever even with its issues but when stacked up against the giants of course it’ll fail or score very low but i have to hand it to MS for the improvements however late it may be.
for them to beat Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome they have to get with the current standards either fix Trident or switch to a competitors version <-will never happen XD
wonder if it supports css3 yet….hmmm *shrugs, eye rolls*
While IE8 certainly is an improvement from IE7 it still has a long way to go. Most of the socalled new features has for long been available as addons in Firefox, like the colortabs.
Thanks for a great summery of IE8. :)
Tsk tsk the results sucks!
Compatibility to standards is important!
A cat turd on a slice of white bread can render HTML better than Internet Explorer.
Seriously, wow i never new you called your mom a cat but well everybody thinks differently.
By the way every web browser can render HTML Correctly. That’s one of the most basic languages ever.
JASOn
I love IE specially IE6 , it makes me a hard working developer.
Let’s me specify code just for IE
Tests for hours just for IE
And everything just to make it work!
I love IE8. Seriously, it’s wonderful – here’s why:
For 2 years I’ve been trying to have my family move to anything but IE, and yet they’ve never wanted to. However, IE 8 froze and/or crashed every 5 minutes on the PC they use at our holiday home (seems to be a known issue with older PCs), and so they had to switch (to FF as it happens).
Once I pointed out all the wonderful extensions, themes, etc for it they’ve stopped using IE even on the PCs at our main home where it worked fine. Thanks Microsoft!
Everything else about it is still crap, but at least it gives me an excuse to convert people to FF for more than my personal benefit.
Can we just ban it? For junior developers like me who just find plugin’s I like and add it to my site, I don’t have the money to pay someone to fix the ie issues on my site. NOTHING WORKS WITH IE ON MY SITE NOTHING. With all the other browsers it works just fine. I’d really love just a full out ban of IE, all versions of it. I can’t comprehend how the company with the largest R&D budget is putting out such fucking filth. From xbox 360 and the ring of death, to vista to ie. Just fuck em.