Does IE8 suck?
I installed Internet Explorer 8 on my laptop at home (Vista Business x64) and my laptop at work (Windows XP Professional SP2) recently. I’ve been having a bit of a play with IE8 – in fact I have no choice at work as company policy dictates IE is the only supported browser (not an uncommon scenario). Here are a few comments I’ve got about IE8 so far …
So, does IE8 suck as much as some people seem to claim already? No, I don’t think so. From the small amount of time I’ve spent using IE8 so far I’ve found a couple of things I like.
- The colour-coded tabs are a nifty feature that make it easy to see which tabs were opened from another tab you have open. This can be pretty cool if you’re a tab-fanatic when browsing Google. Yeah yeah if you have a brain you don’t NEED colour-coded tabs …
- The developer tools (F12) are a welcome addition to IE8 and are probably the biggest complaint from anyone involved in website creation … “Firefox is a ton better than IE because it’s got Firebug!” True but IE8 narrows that gap considerably. This new feature, if it proves its worth, is going to be invaluable for website developers.
- If you’re the paranoid type the InPrivate feature could be considered cool. With an InPrivate window open IE8, supposedly, doesn’t keep a history of your activity. Personally I’m a bit wary of trusting this claim – maybe I’m just one of those paranoid people. Besides, tons of people know about IE’s hidden index.dat files that keep a history of your website visits no matter how many times you clear your termporary internet files/cache.
- Although I haven’t looked into them yet the IE8 “Accelerators” appear to be something along the same lines as Firefox’s add-ons (check out some of the IE8 accelerators).
Apart from the new features I can’t understand why IE8 still seems to fail for so many people. Personally I’m not a die-hard IE fan (I use Firefox 3 when I have the choice) and writing CSS etc for IE versions <=7 is still painful. That said, IE8 works fine with all the sites I’ve tested, including the 6 Wordpress sites I manage and, yes, their admin panels/dashboards work fine too. If IE8 crashes on startup it points to a problem outside IE8 - that’s logical considering it works fine for so many other people. If there was a core problem with IE8 it wouldn’t work at all - anyone can see that. Ok so the Acid3 test which causes IE8 to pack up and go on vacation is another story, one that I’m not going to go into here. I’m the first to admit that Microsoft doesn’t have the best track record for rock-solid software but I’m also not the type to throw Microsoft software in the trash simply *because* it’s made by Microsoft … *ahem* Windows ME anyone?
Will I switch from Firefox to IE8 parmenently? No, but I will continue to use IE as a valid test platform for every website I maintain or work on.
This is my opinion only but it sounds as if some of the issues people have with IE8 are caused by their systems having OTHER problems that they either can’t or simply haven’t bothered to try and fix …
3 Responses to “Does IE8 suck?”
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Internet Explorer 8 seems to be better than any previous version of IE. IE8 is very stable and rarely crashes or cause blue screens.
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Bruce: Agreed in that it is the most stable one yet. I’ve had a few problems with it but on the whole it’s been pretty good, especially on Windows 7.
if a web page do not display correctly into 1 browser and display correctly into all other browser , what will be the name of that “1″ browser?
Will you need more time to develop that web site to make thing appear correctly into that “1″ browser?