Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and Readiness Toolkit released

NathanE · 5 Mar 2008 at 19:15

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/DevelopersNew.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Augmented · 5 Mar 2008 at 20:36

Thanks. Not tried it out as yet, but looking at the release notes it all seems very promising with some great developer features in there already. Thumbs up to the IE dev team... for the time being, anyway

Still on the fence about the <meta> tag render-mode switching method.

MarcLister · 5 Mar 2008 at 21:13

Oooh lovely. Might fiddle around with this and see what IE8 is set to be like.

Mattus · 5 Mar 2008 at 21:39

I'm not too sure about all this 'activities' stuff. To me it looks a bit too similar to the type of proprietary IE code that we've been trying to get rid of for years?

MarcLister · 5 Mar 2008 at 21:52

Mattus said:
I'm not too sure about all this 'activities' stuff. To me it looks a bit too similar to the type of proprietary IE code that we've been trying to get rid of for years?

Can't ever see MS not trying to force proprietary stuff on browser users.

Ross1234 · 5 Mar 2008 at 21:56

The activities are a bit clever though.

Greenlizard0 · 5 Mar 2008 at 22:08

Any screenshots? Not that I'm tempted to stop using Opera - it's just that sometimes not all pages load in the latter.

Greenlizard0 · 5 Mar 2008 at 22:12

"Circular Memory Leak Mitigation"

Is this the problem that affected both Opera and Firefox for a while?

Ross1234 · 5 Mar 2008 at 22:19

L.O.L. hotmail doesn't display correctly and that's microsoft.

simisker · 5 Mar 2008 at 23:35

Augmented said:
[...]
Still on the fence about the <meta> tag render-mode switching method.

At least now they've acquiesced to a more sensible default

[EDIT: Like the beardscratchers.com baseline-led design very much by the way, Mr Aug

]

Johnnytoxic · 6 Mar 2008 at 02:48

Best new feature HAS to be the Favourites bar at the top. Where you can just click on your favourite sites straight away.

Yeah the browser is buggy as expected. I just clicked on Emulate IE7 so I can have best of both.

RobH · 6 Mar 2008 at 03:02

I'm glad they implemented Automatic Crash Recovery finally, before tabs you could get away with only loosing a single window but these days you loose everything. Ideally it shouldn't crash but with plugins such as Quicktime it happens (not picking on Quicktime but it crashes IE7 50% of the time I use it). The favourites bar is also handy even if it was copied directly from Safari.

NathanE · 6 Mar 2008 at 08:29

Favourites bar has been in IE since v4 IIRC. They have just renamed it from the "Links" bar.

Hotmail doesn't work because this IE8 Readiness Kit is, surprise surprise, for internal use as well. Microsoft has a lot of work to do across the company to prepare for the launch of IE8.

Augmented · 6 Mar 2008 at 13:50

simisker said:
At least now they've acquiesced to a more sensible default

[EDIT: Like the beardscratchers.com baseline-led design very much by the way, Mr Aug ]

True, much better to be in 'IE8 Standards' mode by default. And thanks for the comment, lots to add and plenty of tweaking to do yet!