IE8 Beta release…back to work

March 6, 2008 – 12:40 pm - by Thijs

Sometimes you can’t resist doing something that you are bound to regret…Kinda what I felt like when I was clicking the download button for Microsofts IE8 Beta. We’re in the process of optimizing for browser compatibilty for our own beta launch here at YouTellMe HQ, and we’ve got FF, IE6 & IE7 pretty much done after days of finding CSS hacks, Javascipt bugs and other mysterious incompatibilities.

In comes IE8…and it’s back to work… Not just for us, every webdeveloper will have to get into checking and getting their website compatible for IE8. Here’s some of the major sites we all know, seen through microsofts new browser.

CNN.com

CNN Frontpage CNN Frontpage - bottom

CNN.com uses the newest technologies to get that great ‘2.0′ feel. It has a nice scannable website, easy on the eyes and everything can be found easily…that is in other browsers than IE8 ;) Somehow the videos in the left box are all over the place, there’s some floating going wrong, title’s dissapear.

Facebook

Facebook

The home/loginpage for Facebook…somehow the content area got small, for the rest the site didn’t look too bad though.

iGoogle

iGoogle

It takes a while to actually access the iGoogle website, some javascript errors pop up at the login screen and your browser may crash once or twice…but when you get there it looks fine! If only it acted fine too though. Javascript doesn’t work at all, there is no dragging, no minimizing or previewing.

It’s not all bad…

Ofcourse there’s a lot of work to be done, on both the IE and the developers sides. I appreciate Microsoft finally setting a course to comply with the standards, it means more hustle for us developers, but let’s hope it pays of in a few years (when nobody is using IE6 or 7 anymore ;) ). Furthermore they have added a new version of their “Developer Tools” which seems to have better Javascript debugging and CSS support in it. And like Firefox, they now have the possibility to restore your session when your browser crashes (which it will ;) ).

IE8 Beta Debugger Restore dialog

It’s gonna be interesting to see how this browser matures before it will be officially released.

For now…back to work…

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  1. 2 Responses to “IE8 Beta release…back to work”

  2. Nice post!,

    Hope they will improve the javascript excecution speed quite a bit!

    By Thierry on Mar 6, 2008

  3. I noticed this as well, but I thought perhaps it’s breaking on many sites simply because they have some switches that determines if the browser is IE without looking at it’s version, then displays it a bit differently.

    I tested my own site on IE8 and noticed it was all broken up, then I changed my switch to say IE7 or below and all was fixed.

    By nX07 on Mar 6, 2008

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