OK, Microsoft said that IE8 would be standards compliant by default. The first beta of the browser has just been released, and it seems to be available for Windows XP too! That’s a good sign but I don’t know whether it’ll remain available for Windows XP when it enters production state. This beta was released so developers and designers could experiment with IE8’s supposedly new engine.

You can get IE8 at its Web site for free.

Here I take a first look at the browser, and point out some of its not-too-great areas. I shall not bash IE8 as much as I did its predecessors because Microsoft is finally genuinely putting in good effort to make their browser better, even though it’s been nearly a decade now.

First I’ll show you a shot of the overall browser window.

IE8 displaying the IE8 welcome page
IE8 displaying the IE8 welcome page

Just a little note, depending on how you stretch the window horizontally, that arrow will switch between left and right according to the position of the Click the Emulate IE7 Button box relative to the button itself. That’s… cute. You can view the source and take a look at the simple JavaScript of that very page.

Microsoft has said they’ll make IE8 as standards compliant as possible. I don’t know whether or not to forgive them for forgetting to proofread their HTML or something, but…

IE8 beta welcome page does not validate
IE8 beta welcome page does not validate

Anyway, now although it’s entered beta… its rendering engine seems unsatisfactory. There are display bugs, or should I say, regressions, that were not present in IE7 but have stuck themselves into IE8.

For example, one of the little annoyances that I’ve just seen with my upcoming design is that anchor links that were set by CSS to display as block-level elements don’t display as block-level elements. The clickable region only covers the text despite me having set padding, height and other properties.

And yes, this is indeed part of my prototype-final design ;)

Display problems in standards mode not present when emulating IE7
Display problems in standards mode not present when emulating IE7

That’s about it. I haven’t bothered to test the new Activities and WebSlices features introduced in IE8 because I’m not interested in them, sorry. Also, I’ve already uninstalled IE8 and therefore reverted to IE7. I think Microsoft might just make IE8 that little bit better… though only time will tell ultimately.

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