Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 web browser

Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 web browser

Price: Free
Manufacturer: Microsoft

Specifications: Windows XP SP2 or higher • Server 2003 SP2, Vista • Server 2008 • Windows 7


Verdict

Pros: Standards compliance enables the web to move forward; Accelerators, privacy modes and developer tools
Cons: Too late; compliance still behind; high memory usage
Overall: The best IE yet, but not enough to reverse the trend towards third-party browsers


When Microsoft showed the first Internet Explorer 8 beta at the Mix 08 conference in Las Vegas, it was widely applauded for delivering a standards-compliant browser at last, successfully rendering the Acid 2 test page from the Web Standards Project. But is it too little, too late?

Progress seems slow: it’s a year since the 2008 Mix, and at the time of writing IE8 has only made it as far as Release Candidate 1. The Web Standards Project has moved on to Acid 3, a more demanding test that IE8 is nowhere near passing; when we tried it, it scored 13 per cent, then crashed the browser. Most other browsers fail Acid 3 as well, though not as badly. Even after IE8 is released, Microsoft will be behind in standards compliance.

That said, the standards compliance in IE8 is a leap forward from IE7, and includes Aria (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 2.1, HTML 5 Dom storage, enabling web applications to store data on the local machine, and native support for Json (Javascript Object Notation), widely used to manipulate data in web applications. These changes are mostly invisible to users, who just expect websites to work, but matter greatly to the web designers who have the responsibility to make it so, hence the applause at Mix.

Microsoft’s problem is that web authors now expect the quirky habits of previous versions, and deliver specially tweaked pages when they detect IE. These pages now break in IE8. The fix is a compatibility view that reverts to the old layout engine, enabled by clicking a button, or by code in the web page itself, or by inclusion on a list of sites maintained by Microsoft. Intranet sites use compatibility view by default. The compatibility tools work well, but it is unfortunate that Microsoft has had to devote so much energy to this rather than working on new features.

There are a few enhancements. Accelerators offer a handy right-click menu on any selected text, with items that call a web service to bring back further inf ormation in a pop-up preview. Accelerate a place name, for example, and you get a map. Web slices install into the Favourites bar, and show concise content from another website, such as the current top topics on Digg, in a dropdown preview. Private browsing, engaged from the Tools menu, lets you browse without storing browser history or temporary internet files, while private filtering blocks selected third-party sites from tracking your web movements.

Crash recovery attempts to isolate crashes to the current tab, rather than closing the entire browser. This worked with our Acid 3 crash, though IE8 insisted on trying to re-open the crashing page, causing a repeated error. New developer tools in IE8 are excellent for web authors tracing page layout bugs.

Web developers and designers will appreciate it, though it will be years before IE6 and IE7 disappear from view. IE8 is a memory hog, partly thanks to new compatibility and stability features. It is unlikely to win many back from Firefox or other browsers, since its new features are low key, its standards compliance still falls short, and the range of available add-ons is more limited. Internet Explorer does benefit from protected mode on Windows Vista and higher, which runs the browser with restricted permissions for better security, though this is also in IE7. Overall this is a decent upgrade and will be a must-have for users sticking with Microsoft’s browser.

Source : pcw.co.uk