BoltPress

EDIT [8/31]: I rant a little more about their so-called ‘promise’ now. Jerks.

Here it is. The second Internet Explorer beta release. To find out as much as you wish to about the new beta, visit that link. I only go through a few of the so-called new features that were announced.

In March, the IE team announced that IE8 would be standards compliant by default. Well that’s nice and all, but it still has a long way to go, for it still stands as an empty promise. The horrible thing is that Compatibility View is turning us all away from Microsoft once again. They’re simply breaking their own promise that by default, IE8 would run in standards mode. Read this post at the Register for more info. I knew that this promise wouldn’t be anything to gloat proudly about. You can’t trust Microsoft at all. And I’m still skeptical about their open source initiatives.

If we do not consider that trash that is Compatibility View, however, it has indeed been making nice progress. It’s finally turning into what I call a browser. Turning into a browser my ass.

Anyhow, let’s take a look at some screenshots and what I think of it so far:

I tested BoltPress 2.0′s design in IE8. Still not up to par. Remember the bugs I mentioned when reviewing beta 1? Well they were fixed, but BoltPress 2.0 in IE8 still doesn’t look anywhere close to in other browsers… at least I notice most prominently that list images now display properly, like those in Firefox and Safari.

One new feature (doesn’t deserve that title) related to interoperability and IE8 is Compatibility View, for sites that were designed for IE7. If they are a mess in IE8′s standards mode, one would pray then hit that button, which incidentally had to be placed between the address bar and the Refresh button, of all possible places! That’s only the tip of the iceberg: worse, intranet sites are displayed, by default, in Compatibility View! What the hell kind of a decision was that?!

Here are two screenshots, one showing BoltPress 2.0 in IE8 standards mode and the other showing it in the new Compatibility View, one of the features I, along with many others, strongly disagree with because it simply doesn’t make sense, especially for intranets:

Notice how the search text has been disgustingly clipped to occupy only the area superimposed by the background. Now THAT’S new!

But also notice that images defined with the list-style-image CSS property don’t hug the text for dear life anymore. Compare with how it’s rendered in Firefox and Safari:

list-style-image in Firefox and Safari

Neat.

What were once Activities are now known as Accelerators. I don’t understand why the change, I thought Activities made more sense than Accelerators. But whatever:

IE8's Accelerator Menu

All you do is highlight a phrase, address or any other block of text, click the blue Accelerator icon as shown above, and choose what you’d like to do. All from the page you’re viewing.

I’m not blindly promoting some innovative feature of IE8, of course, since Mozilla Labs has just come up with Ubiquity. I’m using it, and it kicks a lot of ass indeed, even as an alpha.

They redesigned the new tab page (about:Tabs):

New tab (about:Tabs) page

Finally, here’s Potassium and Thistle in IE8, they look great:

Once again, in spite of the above, IE8 still has a long way to go before actually impressing anybody.

Oh, and, even if IE8 does emerge as a good kid, I still love Firefox.

Shame on you, Microsoft.