Hi!
> On August 27, 2008, Microsoft released Windows Internet Explorer
> 8 Beta
Well, here are my thoughts. Remember, I *know* this is a beta.
The install went well on an old NCR Pentium 4 PC running at 1.5GHz
with 1GB of installed RAM. The OS is Windows XP Pro 32-bit with SP3.
My only complaint was the lack of a progress bar.
When I rebooted, the first place I went was the Internet Options
control panel, where I found out that my history retention had been
set back to 20 days and the allocation for Temporary Internet Files
was set at a whopping 3,000 megabytes. (The control panel suggested
that I should set this to 1GB at the most, but I know it wasn't
anywhere near either size with IE6. My history setting was also set
for a month.)
I don't know what it is about Windows Updates and such, but some of
them set the security zones to "custom". IE8 setup definitely did
this, and while I'm sure it isn't a big deal, it does annoy the
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.
On the privacy tab, there is a setting known as "InPrivate", but no
explanation exists for this feature in the help system (admittedly
labeled as preliminary). Context sensitive help (clicking the ? button
in the title bar) doesn't work--it brings up the full help system
instead.
Caret browsing (an option present in Firefox for a while now that lets
you browse with the arrow keys and a blinking cursor in each web page)
is now present in IE.
I noticed a few more preferences were not as I had set them with IE6
on the Advanced tab--in particular, reusing windows for shortcut
launch, showing "friendly" HTTP errors, enabling FTP folder view, and
using smooth scrolling.
There's not much else in the Internet Properties control panel that
warrants exploration, although there are some differences from the IE7
control panel and major differences from the IE6 one.
On to the first run of the actual browser...when you do that, Internet
Explorer asks you to set it up. You can do this in two ways: "express"
and "custom". Express probably refers to picking the "Microsoft
Choice" for everything. I used custom setup.
In Custom Setup, Internet Explorer did not know whether it was or was
not to be the default browser. (The default browser on this system is
Firefox 3.01.) I had to tell it no. It offered to import settings from
my other browser, but I did not let it do this. After that, setup was
complete.
I still don't like the goofy Vista-inspired UI that appears. A note to
Microsoft: Menu bars go on the top, toolbars are customizable. Maybe
that isn't the way things go on Vista, but this is XP that we're
running on here, and IE8 needs to be a "good citizen" and play by the
UI rules. This is why I have stayed at IE6.
Oh, and the entirety of the bar at the top of the screen takes up way
too much room and cannot be made smaller in any way that I know of or
could find out about.
Tabs--for reasons that I have not yet explored--have various colors on
them depending upon what kind of site you are visiting. When you start
a new tab, you are given some options. (Unfortunately, I didn't see
one to make the options page go away and let a blank tab be opened.)
You can start browsing privately (meaning that no record of your
history is maintained), use an "accelerator" (a web service that has
been configured for quick use in IE8) to do something with text pulled
from the clipboard, or reopen tabs you had closed in a previous
browsing session.
As to rendering, most sites that I visited did OK without any special
measures. I noticed only minor errors, such as site logos not showing
up in page headings. The "this page contains errors" icon appeared
frequently, but most errors had to do with scripts on the pages. Out
of every site I visited, only The Register had an annoying issue with
the text on the page being too small at the 100% zoom level in IE8.
It was around this point that I noticed the "down" button next to the
address bar (which should show a list of recently typed in web site
names) does not appear to work.
Installation of the Flash player (which I must have only had installed
for Firefox) went off smoothly when I headed over to the Asus web
site.
As far as speed goes, at no point was IE8 too slow to use on this old
computer. It did get a little laggy with something like 35 tabs open
across two windows, but I don't know that I could blame it.
So for the most part, I think Microsoft is definitely on the right
track in terms of bringing IE back into relevance. However, I can't
say that I give them any points for the goofy UI (which needs to go
away and go away *now*) or their extremely poor track record of
supporting and following web standards.
I'll stay with Firefox for now, and probably will continue to do so
for a long time yet. Firefox is available for more platforms, works on
Windows 2000 (where IE8 does not and never will) and doesn't go out of
its way to define a whole new and completely goofy UI. It also follows
web standards a lot more closely. The only reason I see to pick IE
over Firefox is that of speed--IE's rendering engine has always been
fast and light--it's possible to run IE6 on a 486 and have it be
usable, although that isn't something a lot of people will be doing.
And there's no support for ActiveX in Firefox, which is a big plus in
my book.
William
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