I've been following the development of the next iteration of internet explorer since it was made public, especially due to the fact that no version of the browser has ever featured the same compatibility towards HTML rendering then the previous version. Thought this would be different ...
Lo-and-behold, pretty amazed at the "developersentric" approach the team took to ensure that developers get the best of both worlds, developing and testing using just one version of the browser. One step in the right way? So this morning I was gladly introduced to beta version 2.0, yes, a second beta which was released recently. Now, I must say that I kind of hated the "Emulate IE7" tab, mainly because it told me I had to shut down the browser in order for the emulation to work, what's that all about? Thought it's all about plug-and-pray, i mean -play.
Once installed, I no longer found the "Emulate IE7" tab on the toolbar, rather a new little feature called "Compatibility View", which from what I've seen determines the best possible compatibility for a page. And best of all, it only refreshes the tab you would like to "be compatible". No restarts of the browser, just a quick refresh and there you are ready to view your "once screwed up page", in the way it was meant to be viewed. So this is triggering my curiosity a bit, how does it automatically decided which compatibility to mode is suited for that specific page?
Another new feature which I can see will be abused is the "Safety" menu that sports the new Mozilla supplied feature called "InPrivate" browsing, or as I think it will soon be dubbed (I've seen this jump up on a couple of forums today already), "InPorno" browsing. What InPrivate browsing is suppose to achieve is to help users who spend a lot of time logged into secure websites where private data can easily be phished out. When in private browsing, no data is cached or browsing history saved. This seems to be a good feature to use during late hours at work and is probably what will happen. InPrivate browsing can be disabled as well.
IE7 sported a Developer Tools option with some features to debug script errors and so forth, these tools persist in IE8 with a couple of updates. Bart de Smet was evangelising Fiddler at Tech-Ed which makes an appearance in the developer tools, or at least some of the features in Fiddler.
There's a lot more user specific features available in the browser, it looks good and is quite fast compared to the previous versions. The biggest challenge that lies ahead now is to see how well IE8 will handle itself against HTML 5.
Any other views on IE8?
'Not everything is binary, if you look closer you might find some hexadecimal in there somewhere'