Internet Explorer 8 beta 1
Microsoft has released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. I won’t give a final assessment of its standards support and whatnot until the final release, but here are some of my impressions on the beta so far:
- It’s really really slow. I feel almost like I’m using Amaya. In particular, the Web Devout site is nearly unusable because the heading backgrounds take forever to render (they are just tiled 2×1 alphatransparent PNGs).
- Switching to IE 7 mode requires a browser restart. That’s a little annoying, especially since it doesn’t gracefully restore your session like Firefox does during addon changes.
- It broke the Web. I took a run through Alexa’s top 20 sites (cue rant about Alexa’s methodology), and about half the sites had big glaring display glitches. Yahoo is busted up, CNN is bleeding content… even Microsoft’s own Live.com looks like it has seen better days. I predict that the Web is about to have a lot more meta tags.
- Web Devout’s headings are standing tall, but not very proud. It looks like IE 8 has a problem with negative margins in generated content. In fact, IE 8 seems to have lots of problems with generated content (which I pretty much expected). Other than that, it’s actually making a good effort at rendering Web Devout properly without any IE-specific rules that apply to IE 8. Still not up to scratch with the other browsers, though.
- IE 8 still fails 9 tests in the brief CSS test suite I made for IE 7 a while ago.
- Did I mention it’s really slow?
Keeping in mind what IE 7 beta 1 was like, I’m hoping IE 8 will improve a ton before the final release. But for now, the browser is too slow and buggy to actually use, and it doesn’t help web developers much because there will probably be a lot of additional changes before anything in the engine is final. I’ll dive into it more once Microsoft announces that it’s layout-complete.
March 6th, 2008 at 23:28 UTC
Hi David - a few comments:
1) this is an early beta. We do have some rough edges, most definitely. Remember, though, that we’ve built an entire new layout engine for standards mode content from scratch. You’ll see a lot of those rough edges smoothed out in future betas.
2) Breaking the web - yep, that’s the price of standards by default. The web getting a whole lost more meta rags- in the short term, possibly, but I think longer term, though, I think the benefits of being in standards mode will be worth it.
3) As for perf - new layout engine perf hasn’t been addressed yet, which is probably why it feels slow to you. Programmability perf has been improved, though.
Posted using Internet Explorer (Windows) 8.0 on Windows.
March 7th, 2008 at 00:07 UTC
Oh, I definitely agree that the standards-by-default decision is the best thing for the Web in the long run. It’s just a bit unsettling to see that *most* modern websites seem to have problems, and I have a feeling that a majority of those sites will simply use the meta element as a quick fix. But that’s life.
I think the alphatransparent PNG performance problem might have actually existed in IE 7. I just notice it more now since the negative margin issue causes the Web Devout headings to be so big.
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0b on Linux.
March 7th, 2008 at 18:21 UTC
I have problems using the bugtracker, hope this will improve as well over time.
I just wanted to mention that a new bug appeared:
/* IEMac section \*//*/body {background:red !important}/**/is incorrectly interpreted (it wasn’t in IE7 and shouldn’t per spec).
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows.
March 9th, 2008 at 09:24 UTC
WebKit rules the universe.
Posted using Internet Explorer (Windows) 7.0 on Windows.
March 10th, 2008 at 09:58 UTC
I’ve tested IE8b1 too, on a design I’m making to replace my website’s current design.
OK, IE8 is slow - but then, that should be addressed soon.
What I found most unsettling though, was that :before and :after are still not well supported (I’m adding some to block-level elements and classes, with content:’ ‘ and style background; it renders well under Opera, with CSS2.0 (not 2.1) compliance under Firefox 2 too).
There are also problems with padding on positioned elements (I’m using a pseudoframe absolutely positioned WRT the body, which is set to take up the whole viewport no more no less), said padding causes shifting of the elements by as much as it has padding (but then padding is re-applied), this could be caused by the negative margins some elements it contains have, and the element’s size remains what it should be (it spills over).
There still seems to be problems with absolute/fixed dynamically modified elements (help bubble following mouse) impacting other page elements (see http://moneyshop.perso.cegetel.net/moneyshop and http://moneyshop.perso.cegetel.net/moneyshop/form.php for most problematic pages)
The pages are in XHTML 1.0 Strict, sending different MIMEtype and slightly different content depending on UA.
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Linux.
March 20th, 2008 at 03:17 UTC
I have tested IE8 too. And it made my site a real mess.
Some margins / paddings are discarded when placed dynamically. And a lot of other bugs.
It still has got a lot to fix. I would downgrade to IE7 or even IE6.
P.S. Safari 3.1 is also out. I think it added some spell/grammar-checker.
Posted using Safari 525.13 on Windows.
March 27th, 2008 at 09:27 UTC
Addendum to my previous coment: :before and :after are actually well supported in IE 8 beta 1, but just can’t handle images (I tried .GIF and .PNG), be it as background or as generated content. Positions (with solid colour backgrounds and/or borders) do work well.
About margins: it appears that IE 8’s layout engine is FAR from being ‘all new’ - element dimensions are computed once first in Quirks mode, then they are positioned, then they are resized again to be compliant with CSS box model. However, if there is an element positioned negatively WRT its parent, parent’s positioning goes boom. I get something similar in IE 6/7 on some edge cases or in page refresh flashes.
So, when Chris wilson says “Remember, though, that we’ve built an entire new layout engine for standards mode content from scratch.”, it’s bull: IE8 still has IE4’s engine with yet another load of bug fixes (good) and shims (bad!) piled on.
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Linux.