Well then now. I have seen all the pushing and prodding about how “IE8 is now available! Download it now!” and it got me to thinking, should you really be downloading it now? Is it that important to move to it right this exact moment, while people are still writing reviews of it? What advantage do I get from it? What about headaches?
The problem I have is that I am seeing all the usual suspects come out of the woodwork and praise Microsoft again. Now IE8 works ok, but it does have some major flaws still in it. The most major of them is the best thing about it. IE8 adopted open standards. Yep the same standards that Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc… have been using for years, not the Microsoft proprietary versions of theses standards, but the real deal. The problem is that there are a lot of web sites that were optimized for IE7 and earlier, and do not render properly in IE8. Heck, I heard from a friend who got IE8 and all of a sudden the Microsoft web site wasn’t showing properly.
Yes, IE8 is going to be a fantastic browser, but it needs the sites to catch up to it. This is what happens when you force a bastardized standard on people for so long, and then switch away from it. Growing pains. I would suggest waiting 6 months to a year to get IE8 and make sure you get the instructions on how to uninstall it, just in case.
Are you using IE8, and what are your thoughts on it? Leave a comment and let me know.
This is exactly why I never upgraded to IE7. I still use IE 6 in concert with Firefox 3.0.7. In my line of work, I look at websites all day long and ever so many of them do not render properly in one or the other browser, mostly due to bad float tags in the css file. I look forward to the day when I can go back to using a single browser again!
The standards IE8 implements are far more restrictive than the typical “open standards” implementations on other browsers. And these so-called “standards” are far from the suggested W3C standards–a useless organization, in my opinion, since they lack the power to enforce any of their suggestions.
As a web developer, the differences between even versions of browsers often has me wanting to poke my own eyes out when trying to implement anything beyond HTML 1.1 standards. Even the differences between Firefox 2.x and 3.x (often over-hyped by users who really aren’t in the know) can be cringe-inducing.
Strangely enough, I’m OK with most of the breakage in IE8. At the very least, there’s a “force IE7 mode” meta-tag which allows pages to behave [mostly] correctly while redevelopment is occurring. What’s difficult is that because most people _aren’t_ going to upgrade anytime soon (or uninstall because pages are broken), things _won’t_ move forward to this code-base, because the browser share is not unifying, it’s becoming increasingly fractured. And, because technology is readily available to people who don’t understand it, the problem of browser versions are only likely to get worse in the future, not better.
Today, I had to test a single site against the following browsers:
Safari 3.2.1
Safari 3.2.2
Safari 4 Beta
Opera 9.64
Firefox 2.x
Firefox 3.x
IE 6.x
IE 7.x
IE 8.x
Yeah. That’s a great improvement. And people wonder why sites are broken for their browsers? Because there are no standards and no common implementations.
Oops. Left Chrome off that list, too.
Also, what happened to IE8 being part of the windows auto-update? I was looking forward to that day. Frankly, I’m OK if we return to the day where everyone swears off all versions of IE again. At least that’ll bring the testing/development time down again.
Or we’ll start seeing a recurrence of browser sniffers and splash pages asking what browser a person is using, just so things can work.