Hot off the Press: CodeFocus on IE8!

Article
10/30/2008

Update 11:50 am - fixing a formating issue.

In preparation for the Professional Developers Conference, the IE team recently authored some articles for a special issue of Code Focus magazine. The articles cover everything from cross-version compatibility to performance, and include new sample code.

You can read the articles online at the following locations:

Or, if you’d prefer, you can also download the entire issue as a single PDF file. Enjoy!

Eric Lawrence Program Manager

Comments

Anonymous
October 30, 2008
Hopefully the next IE 8 final version comes out early november.
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
I work as a web developer for a lining, and I can't see why Microsoft is even bothering fixing it's extremenly buggy browser... if they would just switch to the Gecko engine they'd save money, and make it easier for us all to develop webpages... ;)
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
Good, Better, Best! The Microsoft IE Team rocks! :-) If I can help at all please let me know. Salute, Mark Wisecarver Technical Evangelist
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
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Anonymous
October 30, 2008
Great to know, however if you still have time to fix a CSS 2 bug... In previous versions of IE, you could define a negative text indent on elements (negative indents are valid in CSS); this worked on elements which didn't have layout (hasLayout=false) but not on elements which had one (hasLayout=true). Now in IE 8, hasLayout is said to be gone, and the problem isn't visible anymore... Except on pseudo-elements containing images. If I do the following: mytag:before {content:"[my block]";display:block;text-indent: -5em} then the generated content will be indented. However, if I do: mytag:before {content:url("myimage.png");display:block;text-indent: -5em} Then the image won't be indented, although it should be. I know that generated content couldn't contain images in IE8b1; it was said to be fixed in IEb2. Obviously, you forgot something.
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
>> I can't see why Microsoft is even bothering fixing it's extremenly buggy browser Good point, but let's be honest - we spend too much time hacking our clean (compliant) code to make it work for those who just don't get the whole windows update thing and are still using IE6. At least if there is a standard-compliant IE on the market (wink wink MS) then there is a chance that one day our lives will be simple and happy... :-) >> Perhaps now, it will gain a real percentage of the market share. If it truly does deliver a safe browsing experience twinned with standards-compliance, then it will deserve good press and the market share. The IE team are under a lot of pressure to deliver! I think that's the nicest thing I've said about IE all year....
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
Thanks for sharing! And the comments still don't work properly. I always get an error when trying to post a comment!
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
Canvas support in IE8 would be nice...
Anonymous
October 30, 2008
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Anonymous
October 31, 2008
On Page 8, Doug Stamper states: "Microsoft Internet Explorer team's goals for final... including early HTML 5 support..." Just what features of HTML 5 are you planning to include? This is all news to me. Or is this Pie-In-The-Sky Marketing schlep?
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
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Anonymous
October 31, 2008
@TakeWithSalt: IE8 includes support for DOMStorage, postMessage(), Connection Events, Window Targeting rules, and a number of other minor (stable) elements of the HTML5 spec.
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] - ah, ok, so not actual markup support or XHTML, gotcha. I didn't read about the "Window Targeting rules" (going to right now), but is this what broke frame navigation in IE7/IE8 beta 2? where every link targeted at a frame that is opened in a new tab still thinks it is in the parent frame structure and crashes hard when it tries to navigate up in the structure? (spawned links in new tabs always "think" they have a parent when they don't)
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
The user agent sniffing code listed as the "correct way" on page 17 is by far some of the worst agent sniffing code I have ever seen. Lets not even mention the complete lack of other better browsers from the sniffed applications, but the alert message of: "You should upgrade your copy." is not how to inform users. If I'm on Expedia.com and this alert pops up, what is it telling me? Upgrade my trip info? huh? Then of course the issue is that you're trying to tell an IE user to upgrade, when so many of them are locked down on a corporate environment where they can't choose a better browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, OR IE8).
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
$SaltGuy, HTML5 explicitly is not XHTML. XHTML is basically a failure which is why HTML5 even exists. Where's an example of your crashing page? $Bryce, it's pretty obvious that some business-type is going to write the strings that the user sees; the point of their code sample is to show how to detect the IE version. As for your claim that it's "the worst you've ever seen"--- well, what exactly is wrong with it? The point is to detect the IE version, which it does just fine.
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
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Anonymous
October 31, 2008
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Anonymous
October 31, 2008
This compatibility mode thing isn't working. There are 2 scenarios where this fails. Scenario 1.) You have multiple applications on a given domain, running on DIFFERENT PORTS. :80 Main End User Application :7000 Application Server Interface :8000 Application Database Interface In most cases, the End User App is up to date, running standards based code (e.g. IE8 Standards mode), but the App server and database server interface are running legacy code in IE7 mode. Since the Compatibility Mode is set per domain (not domain + port), this scenario fails in IE. Scenario 2.) You have multiple applications on a given domain, running on DIFFERENT SUBDOMAINS or DIRECTORIES. www.uberwidgets.com www.uberwidgets.com/daves/ultramapper/ www.globotools.uberwidgets.com/ www.blog.uberwidgets.com/ You might have a blog running (like the one that runs this site) that can't handle modern standards, but the main application can. Or there may be many applications (by different users/companies) running on a subdomain or subpath for a site. This would be quite common for a widgets based site. Since the Compatibility Mode is set per domain (not subdomain + domain OR domain + path), this scenario fails in IE. Finally, since these scenarios (as well as the IntRAnet/Localhost) issues keep causing so much pain, can you make the Compatibility Mode button either (ALWAYS VISIBLE), or an option to make it so. (I don't care if you disable it when a site sends in a META tag to force IE7 mode), but it is a royal PITA when I can't change it to test something because one of the (4 scenarios) above causes IE to fail.
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
IE8 Beta 2 (standards or IE7 mode) as well as IE7/IE6 in a very interesting way. when a form button on pageX.html does this: <input type="button" value="Go to Y" onclick="location.href='pageY.html';"/> If a user clicks the button, on pageY.html the following behavior is observed in PHP. Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome: $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] = pageX.html Internet Explorer: $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] = undefined Now is this an issue with the way PHP (v5) handles IE? or does IE not supply the referer info? Thanks
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
@webster - yeah its a bug in IE (not PHP). Using Fiddler you can see the HTTP_REFERER being sent in if you use a browser like Opera (Firefox uses its own client, not wininet) but when IE (any version) uses the location.href syntax to go to a new url, IE DOES NOT Pass the referer (in the miscellaneous section of fiddlers headers). Which is really odd because if you click on a link with this syntax, it works just fine: <a href="pageY.html">Go to Y</a> Though if you do this, you will not get the referer either (#2nd copy of bug) <a href="javascript:location.href='pageY.html';">Go to Y</a> this fails too: <a href="#" onclick="location.href='pageY.html';">Go to Y</a> Actually Eric L. (the guy who deals with a lot of this HTTP traffic stuff might be able to either fix the bug or explain why IE behaves differently than every other browser)
Anonymous
October 31, 2008
Gerald and webster, why would you write code like that? That's just silly! If your reason has to do with what shows in the status bar, it doesn't the fact that's silly!

Anchors do what you want to do without the redundant JavaScript.
Why are you placing events inline?
Why would it matter what shows in the status bar? Seriously? Why you're at it, why not slap a form on the page, change the action, and use form submittals to navigate everywhere (hint: try doing that and see if resolves your referrer issue)?

Anonymous
November 01, 2008
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Anonymous
November 01, 2008
Well its November, any chance of a release date???
Anonymous
November 01, 2008
@Gerald and @Webster I agree with Glen Fingerholz. A link should be used to load another webpage into the same window instance, not a command button. "javascript:" pseudo-protocol-links should be banned everywhere with the unique exception of bookmarklets. This recommendation is now a widely admitted, known one. "javascript:" pseudo-protocol-links always give a variety of problems (accessibility, usability, etc). @Scott Dickens [MSFT] The "Making Your Web site Compatible Across Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer" article has numerous errors and is definitely NOT recommendable. The code examples have validation markup errors, uses a non-recommended (by W3C) doctype declaration, there are also incoherences in the code. The example on automatic counter and numbering is simple but when one tries bug #96 at my webpage, IE 8 beta 2 fails miserably when all other web standards compliant browsers (Firefox 3, Opera 9.50, Safari 3.1.2, Konqueror 4.1, etc) succeed. So even the provided example in that article is not at all convincing. The whole section on user agent string detection should be removed in my opinion. User Agent string detection

A wide majority of expert web designers will recommend to use object/method detection support first before resorting to user agent string detection. Conditional comment (when used for judicious targeting like working around a particular bug, a specific IE7 incorrect implementation) should be used before even thinking about using user agent string detection. This is not the first time this has been said in IE blog. Regards, Gérard

Anonymous
November 01, 2008
@Scott Dickens [MSFT] The W3C markup validator will report " the Document Type (-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN) is not in the validator's catalog " The possible valid doctype declarations are here: www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html On user agent string detection: A Strategy That Works: Object/Feature Detecting by comp.lang.javascript newsgroup FAQ notes jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/not_browser_detect.html#bdFD Browser detection - No; Object detection - Yes by Peter-Paul Koch www.quirksmode.org/js/support.html Javascript Best Practices by Matt Kruse: Feature-Detect Rather Than Browser-Detect www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/#detect Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 01, 2008
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Anonymous
November 01, 2008
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Anonymous
November 01, 2008
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Anonymous
November 01, 2008
Sometimes, I'm really surprised that those who cry for standards the most, are the ones working against them the most as well. This applies to anyone, really.
Anonymous
November 02, 2008
Its November, is there any kind of release update
Anonymous
November 02, 2008
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Anonymous
November 02, 2008
I downloaded IEv8 and apparently the Internet Explorer cannot display some the webpages! No fix for this issue so far!
Anonymous
November 02, 2008
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Anonymous
November 02, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
Watching the videos of PDC 2008. Nothing is stated about the next release of IE8 (is it beta 3 or ?) Can someone verify?
Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
>> we spend too much time hacking our clean >> (compliant) code to make it work for those who >> just don't get the whole windows update thing >> and are still using IE6. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that IE7+ isn't runnable on anything below WinXP. No sir.
Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 03, 2008
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Anonymous
November 04, 2008
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Anonymous
November 04, 2008
@Mitch74 Can you create testcases of each single problems you experienced with IE 8 beta 2? At this point, the only thing which will help relevant people is by providing reduced, minimized testcase of each of the problems you experience. Again, a real webpage is not what IE developers are looking for but minimized testcase with a clear pass condition, with as little code as possible. Then upload those testcases on a web accessible site and then report the URLs with the "Report a webpage problem ..." IE Addon or post the URLs in this blog. Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 04, 2008
Finally Figured it Out! Finally Figured it Out! Finally Figured it Out! Finally Figured it Out! IE8 Standards Mode REGRESSION BUG. IE8 in Standards Mode will NOT (I Repeat, NOT) fire the resize event on the window element, this is on ALL window objects including iframes and frames. I consider this to be a fairly critical regression bug, since there is no workaround for this. Arghh No wonder sites look so messed up in IE8... glad I finally figured this out. Please advise if Beta 3 has a fix for this. steve
Anonymous
November 04, 2008
Steve that is an IMPORTANT BUG!!!!
Anonymous
November 04, 2008
@steve_web > IE8 in Standards Mode will NOT (I Repeat, NOT) fire the resize event on the window element Steve, You may want to validate and to vote for bug 364571 connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=364571 > this is on ALL window objects > including iframes and frames. No, not a regression for frame objects. IE 7 was not firing resize events for frames (don't know about iframes). URL: www.gtalbot.org/BugzillaSection/FramesetMetaTestCase.html Steps: resize top frame and the counter won't increase. One last thing. Giving a meaningful, helpful and sensible title to a blog post message can and will help IE team people when they could (in the future) look for various kinds of bug reports or various types of enhancement requests. Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 04, 2008
Still no tool for debugging memory leak issue which is still a problem in IE8
Combobox/dropdown list still have the fixed width problem - when it is set to fixed width, the dropdown menu width is fixed as well! So I'm looking forward to a new IE yet. please work on those!!!
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
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Anonymous
November 05, 2008
do i just delete the webslice shortcut in Favorite Bar to unsubcribe? how do i unsubcribe the a webslice?
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
thank you www.dorra-2009.blogspot.com
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Final release is in November right
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
@lezby: No, no one at Microsoft has provided a release date.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
<<Still not taking this browser serious.>> Then you're not a serious person. By this time next year, IE8 will be the most popular browser on the planet. For serious web developers, that's plenty of cause for serious consideration.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Stan: you're deluded, it'll take longer than that for IE8 to spread. It's not as if IE7 became the most popular browser within a year after its release.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
I notice that Windows Explorer also have information bar when opening network and the highlight is light blue when mousing over the information bar and much better color than the IE 8 Beta 2. Change the blue color highlights to light blue when mousing over the Information bar(Similar color when mousing over refresh/stop button)
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
<<It's not as if IE7 became the most popular browser within a year>> Data for your claim, please? Here's mine: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Market_share_by_year_and_version It's pretty annoying that anything with a hyperlink in it is treated like spam by this comment system.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
@Stan - keep a few things in mind. 1.) Pre-WinXP users still can't update IE 2.) Many IE6, IE7 users will not move up Between Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE7, and IE6... I don't see IE8 stealing enough market share even from "within" the IE install base to garnish the #1 spot. Based on the number of issues with IE8 at the moment I do not see upgrading being a mass-appeal thing when it goes from beta2 to beta3, beta3 to rc, or rc to rtm. Most developers are not going to change any of their code until IE goes to RC after the next beta so they know what they are coding against, and many won't update their old code due to lack of access, time or lazyness. I wish IE8 lots of success, but not for an RTM before 2009.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Errr... yes, there's a number of users that are still on the internet using Windows 2000 and lower. Of course, when rounded to the nearest %, that number is 0%. Chrome has <1% share, as does Opera. Safari has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5%. Firefox2 falls out of support in a few weeks, and has virtually no share anyway. Firefox 3 has plenty of share, but it's not meaningfully growing. By the end of 2009, IE8 will be the most popular browser in the world.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
On the second page of the "Making Your Website Compatible ...." article, it says to use X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7, but everything else says to use IE=7. Which one should be used? I thought I had it all figured out, even with the changes between beta versions, but that just confused me.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
@rpgfan3233: The X-UA-Compatible tag differences are as follows: "IE=7" means "Render this page in IE7 strict mode." "IE=EmulateIE7" means "Render this page in IE7 strict mode UNLESS it's a quirks mode page, in which case, render it in quirks mode." Using the latter helps ensure that your page works as it did in IE7, by preventing quirks pages from being forced into IE7 strict mode.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Number of Win2000- systems is closer to 3%, if http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10 is to be believed. That is still vastly lower than I expected.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
@Stan - I'll take that bet. Nov 5th, 2009 IE8 will not have the #1 share. It will be either IE7 or Firefox 3. The biggest issue is lock down enterprises that won't upgrade their systems due to I.T. depts that won't move forward. The good news is than many advanced companies now allow users to upgrade their own apps. So when a user wants a better browser than IE6 or IE7 they can upgrade to Chrome, Safari or Firefox. So far the number of users that upgrade to a better browser and then downgrade back to IE7 or IE6 is near zero. The best thing about an open web is that users get to pick the best tool for the job. One day that might even be IE.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Firefox 3 biggest feature was the awesome bar but IE team really did a good job on the smart address bar by making it organize and adding a autocomplete suggestion "shift+Enter" Another reason to use IE again. My only complaint in IE 8 beta 2 right now is stability and performance issues sometimes the address bar would not show the website title and url link. <website has not set a title> or .url or the registry location would show up or the windows explorer location of the shortcuts. The IE 8 beta 2 browser crash 13 times compare to IE 7 5 times shown by reliability and performance monitor.
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Stan: in pretty much all of the public web browser stats I check out, as well as the stats of my own stats, I can tell you IE7 only surpassed IE6 a few months ago. Meaning it took almost 2 years rather than 1. Check the archives for these sites for example, if you will (like through http://www.archive.org/ or whatever): http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
@Gérard: my bad! Most of the problems come from an obvious reflow problem in IE8, as reducing the page to its simplest form show pseudo-elements' content:url("image.png")... Sometimes. Pressing F5 repeatedly will display the image in one pseudo-element, then in the other, then in both and then in none. The more complex the page, the less likely is generated content to appear. This may just be fixed along with the huge reflow bug: reset scrolling on DOM modification. As soon as I've put together enough test cases, I'll publish them here. For now, this one is: http://moneyshop.perso.cegetel.net/moneyshop/testcases.html
Anonymous
November 05, 2008
Precision to the above: another thing that triggers this peek-a-boo bug is resizing the window enough to trigger a reflow.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
@Gérard: there! I finished the test cases, all in http://moneyshop.perso.cegetel.net/moneyshop/testcases.html To see the errors, load/reload (F5) the page's content, resize the window, refresh when scrolling is at the page's bottom... It seems there is 'only' one bug at play: pseudo-element's image content isn't reliably loaded nor displayed. It is not a resource loading problem though, as there are only 2 different images in this, and they are several times - but not always displayed. It seems the upgrade from beta 1 wasn't complete.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
@Mitch 74 I created a much simplified, minimized testcase from one of your tests: www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE8Bugs/negative-margin-generated-content.html and I'll report it to connect's IE beta feedback A few notes regarding your webpage:

text-indent should be used only for the right purpose, for the best element (one with text, obviously) and in the most adequate code context and not for positioning purposes, layout control
your CSS code is definitely over-constraining a couple of elements and my experience taught me that this sort of coding approach is bound to break in browsers, in different context (text size increase|decrease, viewport dimensions modified, etc). Overconstraining, over-declaring and over-coding is most often the sign, the path of a code that will eventually fail and that is over-excessive for the real goal
if all your code is aimed at compensating for absence of border-radius support in IE 8, then your "solution" is over-excessive in comparison to the problem (absence of rounded corner). Just live with such absence of support: no IE 8 (and lower) user will ever complain about such missing rounded corner. And your code maintenance will be a lot more easier. Regards, Gérard

Anonymous
November 06, 2008
Stifu, the fact that you even mention the w3schools data shows how little research you did. Even THEY admit their stats reflect nothing about browser share on the web at large.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
blog comments borked again, submits to the index page, not the post page.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
@Mitch 74 I posted bug 380412: [GC :before content url()] Negative margin is not applied to generated content connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=380412 Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
@Compatibility Mode Fail: It's even worse than that. If I go to a site such as www.ssc.govt.nz and add the domain to the compatibility list, it adds the entire govt.nz second-level domain. If I then go to another government site such as www.justice.govt.nz then it inherits the settings from the other site. So far I haven't heard anything about whether this will be fixed in a future release, or whether the entire govt.nz second-level domain will be affected by this issue.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
Hi IE developers, Please tweak IE to pass ACID3 Test. Please focus on how you fix this test first before anything else. For those who doesn't know about ACID3 Test, please search them with your favorite search engine. :)
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
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Anonymous
November 06, 2008
is compatibility mode going to be fixed in the next release? there seems to be so many problems with it and with IE8 not being ready for prime time the button is very important. also can has someone explain when the next beta of IE8 is going to be? i will be taking holiday for next 2 weeks i don't want to take my notebook but if there is release i would like for test. much thanks hav
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
IE8 is the slowest Next Gen browser out there... Compared to Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox 3, especially 3.1 with tracemonkey, IE 8 gets owned. I hope this gets remedied, I'm not sure how it will, but I hope it does.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
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Anonymous
November 06, 2008
Hey IE team, what is this I'm reading: www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/06/microsofts_ballmer_considers_using_webkit_within_ie.html Does this mean WebKit will take over in IE9? I will NOT accept such a browser after so much development and investment of my work, time and money around Trident. Tell that to Mr.Ballmer.
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
I reallly hope this works;it's 6 in the morning and to be honest I'm tireds of all this stuff, so PLEASE SIGN ME IN!!!
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
I reallly hope this works;it's 6 in the morning and to be honest I'm tireds of all this stuff, so PLEASE SIGN ME IN!!!
Anonymous
November 07, 2008
anonimous: this is just stupid. Whether they use Webkit or make Trident better, the point is to improve the rendering and make things better for developers. The fact it was worse before is totally irrelevant, we don't want things to stay the same, we want things to be cleaner and easier. Sure, they could have switched to Webkit earlier then, but that's beside the point. We want IE to improve, and its old bugs to be gone.
Anonymous
November 07, 2008
@anonimous - I read that link too! Yeah, glad to see that Steve Ballmer has a sense of humor and is aware that IE isn't the greatest rendering engine out there. As for MS using it, why not? I've spent tons of time tweaking for Trident, true, but I would drop it all in a heartbeat if they swapped it out for Gecko, Webkit, or whatever Opera uses. in a heartbeat! MS could keep all the other stuff that they might want, but with a better rendering engine, we would have 1 less level of testing/debugging our content for IE. That's what I love about Google Chrome, its a new browser, but if your stuff worked in Safari, it pretty much works perfectly in Chrome, with no tweaks at all.
Anonymous
November 07, 2008
Stifu, you're right, we don't want to let things stay as they are. As I found out in this "magazine" (?) IE8b2 includes a 4th mode (Almost Standards Mode). This is the worst decision MS made for IE8 so far, and I hope they'll undo this for the final release. See Bug 379343 (https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=379343) The problem is:
The only bug emulated by this mode is easily fixed and doesn't need a workaround on the engine.
This is so inconsequent. This is one of the smallest problems websites would encounter, when they switch from IE7 Standards mode to IE8 standards mode. There are so many ways for web developers to mitigate this problem, yet the IE devs seem to feel it'simportant.
Sad is, were MS not implementing this unecessary mode, Mozilla, WebKit, Presto and whonotall could also remove their Almost Standards Modes. But maybe that's nothing MS likes to think about? I hope, and pray, that this functionality will not make it into IE8, for a better future of the Web.
Anonymous
November 08, 2008
Is beta 3 coming this month? I'm looking forward to fixes for all the issues in beta 2 so I can start adjusting my production code to handle IE8. I would hope that after beta 3 that there wouldn't be (m)any more significant changes... right? I'm not going to code against beta 2 of course because it is still to far from ready but I'm anxious to start finalizing code to handle IE8's changes (for good or bad). thanks randal
Anonymous
November 08, 2008
If they fix all issues in Beta 2 then final version will come out this month
Anonymous
November 08, 2008
Brez: most useless post here. :p It's not like any browser vendor, let alone the IE team, fixes all issues before releasing a new version.
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
IE8 may be a "rendering engine", but it's not a "browser". Browser lets users browse the web sites. IE8 just crashes 5 times/minute instead. Please rename IE8 to the more appropriate "Windows Crash Exploder".
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
IE8 has a really great AJAX support. It's true.
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
I can't say I won't be surprised if there is no beta 3. I don't think IE 8 is ready for prime time so to speak. Then again to quite a few beta testers of Vista it wasn't ready yet either. My scenario is Microsoft may give up on IE 8 and release it and concentrate on IE 9 to address the myriad of issues that seem to be plaguing IE 8. Off topic here, Windows 7 still carries on the locking up of the UI, can't move the menu, address bar, tool bar, this stance started with Vista/Longhorn ver 4074 and carries on to this day. Four years of the same complaints and still no end in sight..... (hey do you think I would not throw in a jab at the pathetic UI)
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
@Eghost: No one's "giving up" on anything, and the suggestion is ridiculous. The IE team remains hard at work on IE8. @Fduch: I assume you've tried running IE without addons to eliminate those as a source of problems? (www.enhanceie.com/ie/troubleshoot.asp#crash) Do you see the same crashes when in Compatibility View? We've made tons of reliability improvements since beta-2, so rest assured that the next public build will be far more robust.
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
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Anonymous
November 09, 2008
@EricLaw Sorry poor choice of words, let me rephrase, Microsoft will possibly ship IE 8 with out having a third beta, issues that people are having could be addressed at a latter date either in the form of a service pack or possibly in the next revision. Eric, let me make this clear I have no doubt that IE team works hard, They have done some great improvements in IE 8. Yet for me the lack of a fully customizable UI is a major flaw and impediment. I want to use Microsoft products, I have for years almost exclusively. Like it or not since the early betas of Vista Microsoft has either given up, ignored, or just doesn't feel as though there is enough consumer demand to warrant addressing the UI customizations. The pre beta of Windows 7 and the beta of IE 8 exacerbates this belief because neither one is fully customizable, the address bar has become forbidden ground. Yet no one from Microsoft will say why? Or, "The reason why it's better this way is because..." In closing, I'm just disappointed, I've seen the comments in the betas of vista, and IE 8, for the most part they have been condescending, "it's no big deal", "only 20% of users move the tool bars around" to me 20% when it comes to the windows user base is a significant number. I hope the IE team addresses this, because then possibly the Windows team will also. To you it may not be a major improvement, for me it will be the tearing down of the final wall that prevents me from moving on from IE 6, Firefox,and Windows XP. Again great work, but I am sorry it's just not quite there, for me....
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
In the past months. I heared that final release of IE8 will b in Nov 2008. Almost half of Nov is gone. So i dn't think any other Beta 3 version before RTW of IE8 is Their. Waiting for next Build of IE8..
Anonymous
November 09, 2008
You guys are really holding back the web here. All I really want from you is SVG support - I can code around all your other bugs - I'm used to it anyway, but lack of SVG is really disappointing. Why go to all this effort just to release browser less capable than Firefox, Opera or Safari? Even the friggin iPhone supports SVG now. Can we at least get an honest answer about when you expect to support it or why you won't?
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
I reallly hope this works;it's 6 in the morning and to be honest I'm tireds of all this stuff, so PLEASE SIGN ME IN!!!
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
What is all this fuss over IE8 natively supporting SVG? How could that possibly make IE8 better? I very rarely ever EVER see SVG's on web pages. I only ever see them on wikipedia. And there is already an SVG plugin from Adobe for IE that I hardly use because I don't ever see any SVG's.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
What is all this fuss over IE8 natively supporting SVG? How could that possibly make IE8 better? I very rarely ever EVER see SVG's on web pages. I only ever see them on wikipedia. And there is already an SVG plugin from Adobe for IE that I hardly use because I don't ever see any SVG's! But hey, while were at it, why don't we complain to Mozilla to natively support every plugin it has for FireFox? "Holding back the web". Really Geoff? That's gonna make things better? Okay IE team, heres the secret to make IE successful, support SVG. When you do that, nobody will complain about IE anymore about standards, slowness, lack of this or that, it won't matter because it now supports SVG and that makes everything better! Look, I'm all for suggestions to make IE a better web browser, but complaining about not natively supporting SVG, it's just nonsense. There are much more important things for the IE team to focus on then supporting SVG. I can already tell I'm gonna get a lot of hate comments on this, but thats just the way I see things.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
What is all this fuss over IE8 natively supporting SVG? How could that possibly make IE8 better? I very rarely ever EVER see SVG's on web pages. I only ever see them on wikipedia. And there is already an SVG plugin from Adobe for IE that I hardly use because I don't ever see any SVG's! But hey, while were at it, why don't we complain to Mozilla to natively support every plugin it has for FireFox? "Holding back the web". Really Geoff? That's gonna make things better? Okay IE team, heres the secret to make IE successful, support SVG. When you do that, nobody will complain about IE anymore about standards, slowness, lack of this or that, it won't matter because it now supports SVG and that makes everything better! Look, I'm all for suggestions to make IE a better web browser, but complaining about not natively supporting SVG, it's just nonsense. There are much more important things for the IE team to focus on then supporting SVG. I can already tell I'm gonna get a lot of hate comments on this, but thats just the way I see things.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
@Eric Law - "@Jake: Which XP theming issue are you referring to?" Uhm, the hugely obvious one where any change to a select list's border or background styles cause a de-theme on windows XP. Has been reported since day 1 of the Beta 2 release.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
jake... it's only "hugely obvious" if you happen to set a border or theme on a select control, which is far from common. because this limitation has been there forever (IE6) with no broad outrage, it's hard to see how any serious person could consider this a "major outstanding issue". A better question is what exactly you'd WANT to happen in this case? Your page explicitly tries to style a SELECT element-- why would you expect XP themes to be applied?
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
@Joe - dude you are way off base! You CAN style the border AND background of a select list in IE5, IE6, IE7, IE8-CompatMode, but NOT in IE8 Standards Mode. The bug is unique to IE8 Beta 2 - in Standards Mode. Second - the issue is VERY common. If you like pure black and white controls in your applications then hey go for it! but for the other 90% of the web developers out there we like to add a little style, even if it is only on focus so the user knows where on the form they are. Again, I repeat, this worked just fine in EVERY other browser that runs on WindowsXP. Only IE8 (in standards mode) can't handle the styling without messing up the native chrome. It is what us professional developers refer to as a MAJOR REGRESSION BUG.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
Just how reliable are web slices? I just created some and set the reload timer to 15min. I made 3-4 changes on each over a 1 hour period. None of the slices went bold to indicate a change (nor did the titles change) Does IE cache any of the page content? does it ignore HTTP Headers / always request a fresh copy? I'd post a url but the site is on a local Intranet.
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
Well you don't see much SVG on the web yet because IE doesn't support it. Which is precisely why I think Microsoft is holding back the web. And honestly, If you don't think vector graphics are important and will change the way web developers do things, why do you think microsoft is putting so much effort into Silverlight and XAML? Microsoft is being completely hypocritcal in saying they are working towards supporting web standards while ignoring the bits that compete with their own technologies. And yes, I do want Mozilla to support all open web standards natively - I want all the browsers to.
Anonymous
November 13, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Recently someone asked me about the best practices for AJAX performance. Though this information is scattered

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