Mar
19
2009
In today’s keynote at MIX09 Internet Explorer 8 was demonstrated and surprise surprise it is now also released. As of today you can download Internet Explorer 8 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.
I think a browser is just a browser, how many more tools do I need to view a web page? Sure, one browser may display the page a little differently than the other but no wonder…the standards are not standards but a recommendation! According to the demo, Microsoft really looked at the standards and used the W3C tests to make IE8 compliant… the question is who is going to check if IE8 is really compliant, I guess we leave that to the open source Linux community to establish.
IE8 improves on how your browser crashes… what?? you may ask… yes, basically each tab in IE8 is a separate process so if the page in one tab would cause the the “browser” to crash only that tab would be affected. The funny thing is that the speaker did a demo about how Firefox crashes, the speaker had two tabs open one with a video and the other tab he was using to browse a page which caused the browser to crash… well that was funny…now on to demonstrate IE8.. I was really thinking ok here it comes IE8 doesn’t crash when you repeat the same scenario…. but no… it crashed too but only the one tab though :-) As a developer we can learn from this… it is not important how we display a user friendly message to the user and let them resume with their work, no.. just partially crash and just convince everybody that it is the new and improved way.
I am sorry, I am never this critical towards Microsoft but are they not using their own try-catch blocks? why is any browser crashing in the first place? It is just an interpretation of some markup language with some scripting… try-parse-fail, display message, move on..
Anyways, what I wanted to say was Internet Explorer 8 is available and give it a try. I have been using IE8 Beta on Vista for a long time now (I know I am a rebel) and I have not experienced any problems (with both).