IE8 supports standards mode by default. Great move from Microsoft. Here are some random thoughts about IE8:
The ‘Emulate IE7′ Joke
From the IEBlog:
For the Internet Explorer 8 Beta, we’ve added an Emulate IE7 button to the command bar. It will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it
Quickly means that you have to stop all your work and restart the browser to test a webpage in IE7 mode.
What is the need of the Emulate IE7 button? I have IE7 installed in my system.
Why should someone make a website for IE7 when IE8 is around? I can’t see any need. Make your websites to the standards. Thats it. There is no need to support any non-standard browser. It will make the already broken web worse.
Hopefully, the button will be present only in the IE8 beta.
Unstable
IE8 frequently crashed while I was using it. Having a session restore feature does not mean that you can hang my computer and lose my unsaved work.
Address Bar Woes
Microsoft has introduced many features to the address bar of IE8. But there is a problem that seriously affects my style of browsing. When I paste a URL to the address bar and change the tab (without navigating to the URL), the URL is lost. When I switch back to the tab, I see the URL of that tab, not the URL I pasted there. This happens to me a lot. It should be fixed. It is a simple improvement that I think is very much needed.
You ask why should someone make a website for IE7 when IE8 is around. Thing is, A LOT of people still use IE6, so there’s always a need to check websites in different browsers.
Both my blogs use IE6 hacks, which is a pain to do, but necessary for perhaps a quarter of visitors (rough estimate).
David,
I am talking from the web standards perspective. It is true that we should support all of our users, but that must not be by breaking the web.
Yea, Would it not be better if they scrap everything and start supporting a single standard. With MS, is it so hard to implement a standard?
And plugins would have solved half the problems, only if they existed. It will make it useful for those needing it and not bloat the browser.
Anand,
It is true that adding unwanted functionality to a browser makes it a bloatware.