So if the big point about Firefox is that I don’t like the non-native UI rendering, what odd thing am I going to pick on for IE8?
Well, I’m not going to write a review – it’s far too late, and we’d all be far too bored by that. But there are still some interesting points to make – but let’s do ourselves a favour and I’ll limit myself to a Twitter-like 140 chars per point.
Let’s kick off:
“Good enough” doesn’t work when the competition continues to raise the bar.
IE is already comically behind. And now not shipping until next year (I bet with win7). Had expected this year with another rev for win7.
Compatibility view pushes the problem to the user. How does my mom know how to use this? Is the user base going to accept/understand this?
How does Firefox and WebKit render the web so well? Are sites really pushing radically different content to standards compliant browsers?
The IE blog has been great at getting the information out. As I shall soon demonstrate with lots of links…
And veering dangerously close to review:
The search box and address bar suggestions are a clear (ahem) homage to Firefox. But IE’s is prettier.
The address bar suggestions use Windows Search. Hooray for a surprising example of reuse! How totally unlike Microsoft!
Accelerators = Smart Tags. Web Slices are great iff you are Ebay. Grouped tab browsing is less gimmicky than I expected.
Activities, Web Slices and grouped tabs could easily be created with Firefox extensions. Web Slices already have. Oh, so have Accelerators.
(Web Slices Sidebar gadget. Cool hack. Shame I’m not following anything on Ebay.)
Developer tools are really good. Even got a nicer View Source app.
No-one else seems to have noticed you can switch style sheets from the View menu.
The RSS platform didn’t see much love. Ok, authentication. And it does power Web Slices, and you can search titles…
But seriously folks:
Process isolation is very clever, and is genuine innovation.
Session restore. Hallelujah. But is it just me, or does it only work for one open window at a time? Here’s hoping it’s a beta bug…
So there we are. I think I managed to keep within 140 chars.
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