Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Download Is Here

The New Cycle Of Pain

Microsoft has just released its next Generation browser IE 8. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth from developers it seems that Microsoft has decided to follow the standards set up by the World Wide Web Consortium or so it seems.

The most unusual feature that reflects Microseft’s envy of the so called web 2.0 sites and its desire to prop its failing web properties and associated catchup sites is called Activities. To quote:

Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. Activities typically involve one of two types of actions:

• “Look up” information related to data in the current webpage
• “Send” content from the current webpage to another application

Most of the options are mainly Microsoft sites with the addition of digg and facebook. In other words Encarta will never surpass Wikipedia no matter how many msn users edit it. Just another instance of too little, too late.

Another new feature is called WebSlices:

Web sites can expose portions of their page as a WebSlice that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes.

In fact this sounds nice, but judging from the wording it seems it’s IE only markup. Firefox on the other hand had web scraping extensions for some time. These type of features belong in an extension and not in the browser, and will soon join Microsoft’s past inventions the IE4 Active Desktop and “Channels.”

Other features include:

We have made enormous investments in building a new formatting engine from the ground up towards our goal for full CSS 2.1 support, started implementing HTML 5, and also in delivering a more interoperable Document Object Model implementation. In support of that work, Internet Explorer 8 will render web pages, by default, using the new Standards Mode formatting engine.

So what will in fact change anyway:

The balance between interoperability (meeting W3C and other standards) and backwards compatibility (for pages authored to work around Internet Explorer 6’s and Internet Explorer 7’s behaviors) has always posed a challenging question.

Translation: We can’t change much because it breaks Windows and our huge microsoft.com site. This also explains why it will use 2 rendering engines instead of one.

It doesn’t look much different than IE 8:

It’s only beta 1 (Developer Preview) and is mostly for developers, so if you want to browse the web with it you have to click Emulate IE7 button in the command bar to browse the web like you did in IE7.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Whitepaper pdf at microsoft.com

The IE8 full release notes are here: microsoft.com

To download IE8 go here: microsoft.com

In other words skip it unless you’re a developer and get Firefox instead. Besides Firefox 3 Beta 3 is out and 3.0 will be released soon.

In related news spreadfirefox.com is celebrating its 500 million downloads with a redesigned site.

/bile

UPDATE:

It was reported that IE8 passes the acid test 2, but when I tested it, it failed. No mention of acid test 3, which at the moment is passed only by Opera 9.5.

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