IE 8 beta 1 available for download – some quick takes
For those of you who have missed it, IE 8 beta is now available for download. Let’s take a quick look on what’s in it.
Interesting features
Let’s start by taking a look at what I think are the most interesting support/new features in IE 8:
- Full CSS 2.1 support
- They hope to support the most requested CSS 3 features
querySelectorAllsupport, i.e. using CSS selectors in native script to find elements.- Some HTML 5 features supported
- ARIA support
First impressions
I have only used it for a very short time, but as far as I could see, web standards compliant web sites seemed to work. However, I’ve heard from lots of others that they’ve encountered weird rendering bugs.
I was, at first, very impressed that they had added support for the Selectors API. THe second web browser out of the door, just behind nightly builds of WebKit. The major downside to this, though, is that they only support up to CSS 2.1 selectors, as opposed to WebKit supporting CSS 1- 3.
When Firefox and Opera, and I say when instead of if, implement querySelectorAll they will surely have CSS 3 support as well. Hence, the support in IE will have vital shortcomings, and basically render it useless for developers.
I hope/pray/beg that if/when they implement CSS 3 support, at lest for the most regeusted CSS 3 features, that they will also implement this in the script support.
What’s missing
- Proper W3C event handling support (they’re still stuck with
attachEvent). - XPath support (as in native with
document.evaluate). Very powerful and flexible. - Hard to say yet, but I’m sure I’ll mention some CSS 3 support in the future.
Download IE 8 beta
You should right away go and download the IE 8 beta. If you don’t want to take the risk or taint your system, there’s a time-limited Virtual PC image with IE 8 available for download.
Give feedback
There are some options to give feedback, so please, instead of bitching about features you miss or think you are incorrect, help them out with bug reports, feature requests etc.
It's certainly been an interesting week for IE8.
If they keep their current stride of making good decisions for IE8, I might actually have to take back some my rants with regards to IE … in a couple of years 😉
[…] First Impressions of IE8 BETA 1 from Roger Johansson who’s not that sold we’ll get all the promises. Robert Nyman also has a quick take on the IE8 Beta. […]
Thank you for the feedback link. 🙂
I don't have Windows at home, so my only place to test IE8 is work – which isn't that easy since one tends to be busy.
But I like the "emulate IE7" button.
It isn't likely that I blog about ie8 testing, but I will definitely write give feedback. Once again, thank you for the link.
[…] you all probably are aware of, IE 8 beta has been released, and for me, one of the first thing I wanted to test was how well DOMAssistant performed with […]
this seems to be a wonderful browser by all means .
ie8 rocks
Why not using Avant browser which based on IE?It’s fast and easy to use,of course I choose it instead of IE due to its stability and compatibility.
[…] IE 8 beta 1 available for download – some quick takes (Robert’s talk) […]