I’ve complained before about Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), how it is the bane of the web developer’s existence and the problems I have with it on an almost personal level. It’s many failings nudged me towards alternate browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. In the years since, Mozilla’s growth in the browser market has stirred the sleeping giant into delivering IE8, a great browser with which to get back in the game.
Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction since the days of IE6, adding tabs, better standards compliance, better security measures, and support for things designers now take for granted such as transparent PNGs, and predictable handling of CSS rules.
The new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is leaps ahead from the cold dark days when it’s grandfather dominated the internet, and if you’re one of those still hanging on to IE6 I besiege you to upgrade with THIS LINK as quickly as possible. Go do it now, this post will still be here when you get back.
First thing I noticed is a markedly smaller memory footprint than the competition. To be fair I opened new instances of IE8, Firefox, Chrome and compared their memory footprint on my system, with the same 3 tabs open on each. Firefox was by far the largest using up about 200 megs of ram, IE8 was next with somewhere around 80 and the very lightweight Chrome was last with a little over 60 megs. This isn’t much of an issue for most powerful machines of today but tweakers and netbook users will appreciate the performance boost. I also haven’t noticed any memory leakage over time which has always been a huge problem with Firefox. On that note IE8 is notably faster than its predecessors delivering page load speeds within milliseconds of the fastest browsers available.
Two of the new big things launching with IE8 are Web Slices and Accelerators.
Web slices let you subscribe to particular sections of a site and have them one click away at any moment, without having to run to the original site. This can be particularly practical with news sites, e-mail services, and social content allowing you can stay updated of everything while moving through the Internet.
Accelerators bring new functionality to your regular browsing experience such as translation and dictionary tools, ebay search and Facebook posting; all straight from whichever page you happen to be in.
It’s great to see Microsoft championing content aggregation as part of what they feel should be integral to a standard web experience. On the other hand both these initiatives are IE8 specific and will require strong developer support to become part of most users’ day-to-day. Many online big guns such as the NY Times, Digg, and StumbleUpon are already part of these initiatives, it will take some time for these efforts take hold with web developers as part of our usual content delivery methods and client offerings.
Much of the other changes have to do with security and stability. Tab sandboxing allows faulty sites to crash their tab while leaving the rest of the browser unaffected. While this doesn’t allow you to just rip a tab out and open a new window, it does create a much more pleasant user experience while navigating through the darker waters of the web. On the security side it molds user behavior towards safer browsing with subtle and not so subtle notices. Domain highlighting for example, helps users distinguish between legit and phishing sites by slightly graying out most of a web address and leaving just the domain black. Although subtle, this tiny change makes users much more aware of their browsing practices and reinforces safer web habits . Microsoft has also upped the security in general fixing the old wholes and vulnerabilities of previous editions.
The browser is also better integrated with other Microsoft products which is a great plus for a more natural workflow. Without adding any Accelerators you can blog with Live Writer, send a page through Live Mail, or add it to your mobile favorites. This is part of Microsoft’s concerted, Live branded, Internet efforts which I really have to applaud them for. Although independently each tool is nice and well put together as a whole it is a very time saving solution which delivers time and again.
The last, and to me, biggest change is a large move towards better standards compliance. Although Acid3 test results aren’t what Microsoft would like, practical real world results speak for themselves. Page rendering is fast and consistent showing exactly what developers intended, usually on the first try. The change has been so significant that it even comes with a compatibility setting which will use IE7’s rendering engine so older sites developed around older versions of the browser will still work consistently.
IE8 has come full force into the current browser competition integrating the best of other browsers, cleaning up the old mistakes and even innovating in various areas. It is also a huge improvement over its predecessors as it includes all the features now commonplace in the market and integrates them seamlessly into a well put together application that benefits greatly from being part of the larger Microsoft family. If you’ve been looking to upgrade browsers now is definitely the time.
