IE 8 beta is out. Is it better? Yes. Is it good? Hmm.
The IE 8 Beta is out.
There is already buzz about it, since IE8 passes Acid 2, supposedly. Of course, that’s a step behind already, since Acid 3 was just released. And according to the Slashdotters, IE8 only scores 17 on Acid 3, compared to the most recent stable version of Firefox, which scores 50 on Acid 3.
There have been some rumors lurking about that it will only work on Vista, and will eventually be totally standards compliant. This is interesting, if so, since it will amount to USING IE8 to push vista adoption, since vista has not exactly broken any sales records. Though if that’s the plan I doubt it will work, since there are other browser options, and no one wants vista.
Additionally, there is an issue for developers. In IE8 there are three rendering options that a dev can code a document to, two of which will render to an IE7 standard, and only one of which will render to IE8 and standards compliance. The trigger is a special meta tag.
Re IE8, what can we expect? According to Alan Gresley of css-class.com, who posted this to the css-discuss list, there have been improvements.
He says:
Well hasLayout, the float bugs, the margins bugs, Sticky hover bug, Guillotine bug, Escaping float bug, Peekaboo bug, Relative position bug and z-index stacking order bugs are all fix. Hooray!
Parsing of the non-valid import filters is fixed.
This also shows why I need my IE/Mac band pass filter to remain in-tacked 
IE8 is now the second browser after Gecko to now support collapsing margins with max-height and min-height.
Collapsing margins with height
Bugs remaining.
Due to using the wrong size repeated background image.
Due to using floated divs or images in list.
My theory is because IE8 needs to see inside ordinary HTML comments to see if they are conditional thus any comment is considered a element in the document tree.
* html = < !DOCTYPE> html
*+html = < !DOCTYPE>+html
div+div
div+*+div
I will be filing in the IE8 beta wiki that IE8 using conditional comments is a bug.
Why doesn’t IE8 use my display:block on my main anchors. Only the text can be hovered. My other menus are working fine.
I don’t know why this the “Up size” text is being clipped.
Thierry of tjkdesign.com is reporting some IE8 Stacking Bugs.
There’s also been a section added to the css-discuss wiki to detail issues with IE8 Beta. I’m sure the css-discuss community will be doing some heavy testing on this sucker. Hopefully some of this stuff is ironed out before it goes into final release form.
I’m sure there will be more to report in the coming weeks, as more issues come to light.
Technorati Tags: IE8, IE 8, Acid 2, Acid 3, Web Standards, Browser Rendering
March 6th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
tried it twice and removed it from both machines 30 minutes later due to bugs –
everytime i right clicked on an image and did save photo as it crashed
March 6th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
OUCH! Thanks for warning us!!!
March 20th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I tried it 3 times and the same happened to me as dhold.A very buggy creature.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I think Microsoft does a lot to push Vista and making IE8 only available on Vista is the same thing as only releasing DirectX 10 on vista. It’s sad when they have to make incentives to try to push people to upgrade.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Tony, that’s on a rumor at this point, but based on past experience (like with DirectX 10) it sounds like it may have validity. It seems like the IE dev team is sincere in wanting to comply with standards, yet corporate always seems to throw a monkey wrench into the works since it might affect the monopoly and the bottom line, and this may end up being a case of IE8 devs wanting one thing and corporate ignoring them and doing something else.
Oh, and IE8 newest beta no longer passes Acid2.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/05/why-isn-t-ie8-passing-acid2.aspx
April 12th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Hmmm.. I have that “right click crash” bug too. Does it have anything to do with any image editing software?