Internet Explorer 8: First Impressions

Today, Microsoft announced the release of Internet Explorer 8 Final, so I figured it would be the perfect time to download IE8 and take it for a test drive. These are my first impressions.

Let’s start by exploring IE8′s new features. One of coolest new items in this browser is the “Accelerators”. These are small plug-ins that help you do routine tasks much faster. For instance, if you see an address on a website and you want to map that address, just highlight the text. Once an address is highlighted, IE8 recognized it and places a small, blue marker next to the text. You then click on that icon to bring up your Accelerator list, where you can select “Map with Google Maps”. Just a highlight and 2 clicks is all it takes to map any address on any page. You can also highlight words to translate them, send to your email, find on eBay, and much more. When I installed IE8, it walked me through setting up my favorite Accelerators, and it is truly easy to do.

IE8 also include an “InPrivate Browsing” button that let’s you browse without saving any history, cookies, temporary files and more. Microsoft says it is great for buying presents online without your family knowing, but I think this feature will get used the most for browsing x-rated sites without fear of getting caught by family members. Regardless of the use, this is a cool feature.

The last, main new feature is “Search Suggestions” which provides suggestions when you type something in to the included search bar. These suggestions are pulled using your browsing history and search providers, so the results are truly customized.

Other new features like “Web Slices” require sites to add additional code to support them, which makes me skeptical if any sites will truly embrace them. Microsoft could scrap this feature at any time and no other browsers support them, so where is the motivation for content developers? This feature will slowly fade away.

Now that I’ve outlined the cool new features in IE8, lets get on to the controversy. Message boards and blog comments are buzzing about this new version of Internet Explorer, and not in a good way. Most people (including myself) do not understand why Microsoft can’t simply adopt web standards that every other browser embraced from the beginning. Most web developers today create their pages for Firefox. They then have to make a few tweaks for Safari and Opera. Finally, they have to hack the code apart to make it work with IE7, and even worse, IE6. Why is this? Because Microsoft insists on doing things their own proprietary way, and the world shall comply. They get away with this because Internet Explorer commands such a dominating market share, due to it being the default browser that comes with all Windows operating systems.

Over a year ago, on the IEBlog, Chris Wilson tried to explain Microsoft’s attempts at moving towards standards compliance with IE8. The simple fact is IE8 did not pass the industry standard Acid2 test, and in order for many pages to work cleanly with IE8, web developers have to insert a custom META tag in the head of every single one of their pages. If web developers don’t do this, they risk having their pages show up broken and mis-formatted. IE8 does have a nifty broken page button next to the address bar at the top of the screen, but why would I want to click that button all the time as I’m surfing the web? It just makes no sense. Chris definitely felt the backlash from his post with the multitude of negative comments and feedback.

I did run into a few broken pages in IE8 right off the bat, and clicking on the “Compatibility View” button did resolve the issues. But, why would I want to do this? Why wouldn’t I just use Firefox and see the web perfectly every time? Microsoft claims IE8 is their most compliant web browser ever, but really, is that saying a whole lot?

I’ll stick with Firefox for now, thank you. When I upgrade to Windows 7 later this year, you can bet I will be taking advantage of the ability to turn off IE8.

Share