IE8: What’s After Beta 2

Articolo
11/19/2008

The announcement of IE8 Beta 2 started an important and public phase of the product development cycle getting broad public feedback. The team is providing detailed information and answering questions about the product in many different places. Now’s a good time to talk about what comes next.

Since the release of Beta 2, the team has been absorbed in the data we get from real people about the product. We have combed through instrumentation of over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions. Together with IE MVPs, we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to “Report a Webpage Problem…”). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations. We simply could not deliver IE8 the way our customers and developers want us to without all this information. We also received a lot of feedback about how we transitioned from the IE7 beta releases to the IE7 final release, and as a result, we want to be clear about the plan for IE8.

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done. They should expect the final product to behave as this update does. We want them to test their sites and services with IE8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work). Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues.

We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release. We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.

The call to action now for the technical community is to download beta 2 (if you haven’t already) and let us know about your experience. Next, please prepare for final testing with public update so you can let us know – quickly, loudly, and clearly – if you find absolutely critical issues with it before the release of the final product.

Thanks –

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

P.S. If you’re a developer, or service provider, or IT professional, how do you prepare for the final release of new software? Leave a comment – we’d like to know.

Comments

Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Ok, I'm on board, glad to finally hear the plan. Thanks for the honesty. Now, between IE8 Beta 2, and the RC you plan to release in Q1,2009 what bugs have been fixed? Has IE Feedback on Connect been updated to include all the internal fixes? In particular I have 3 questions: 1.) Has the window.resize event firing been fixed? 2.) Has the z-index -ms-opacity issue been fixed? (broke in Beta 2) 3.) Has the XP theme regression bug on select lists been fixed? Thanks
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Javascript performance in beta2 is pretty good; much better than IE7. What really needs work performance wise is the DOM rendering speed. In beta2, inserting a lot of content into an existing DOM with complex layout/CSS (aka the primary Ajax use case) can freeze the browser for 4-5 seconds. Firefox/Safari/Chrome are much better at this.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Before deploying a final product, we verify compatibility with current service offerings, notify staff about the upcoming change, and establish a date and notify staff of that date.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@Chase Seibert: We'd love to get the URL of a test case so we can take a look. @Stan: We've done a bunch of performance work post-beta2. As Chase noted, the script engine is often not the performance bottleneck. To build a faster app, you want to focus on the bottlenecks. The post outlines a timeframe (Q1 for RC). IE8 does not include the canvas element. IE8 does include several HTML5 features (as discussed on the blog previously). The HTML5 spec is still under construction, and we focused our energies on the more stable areas that offer the greatest value for web developers (e.g. postMessage, DOM Storage).
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@Chase Seibert: We'd love to get the URL of a test case so we can take a look. @Stan: We've done a bunch of performance work post-beta2. As Chase noted, the script engine is often not the performance bottleneck. To build a faster app, you want to focus on the bottlenecks. The post outlines a timeframe (Q1 for RC). IE8 does not include the canvas element. IE8 does include several HTML5 features (as discussed on the blog previously). The HTML5 spec is still under construction, and we focused our energies on the more stable areas that offer the greatest value for web developers (e.g. postMessage, DOM Storage).
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
IE8 beta2 is still far from a stable product.

Switching tabs is extremely slow.
IE will crash very frequently, when I am typing Chinese in gmail.
The JS engine is extremely slow. Especially by running google applications.

Anonymous
November 19, 2008

The spec is 10 year old
All other browsers handle it
IE does XML and HTML, why not xml+html? And what about SVG?

Anonymous
November 19, 2008
What kind of time frame is between the RC, and the RTM (even presuming that the RC is absolutely perfect!) This is important because we are all waiting to know what fixes are going into the RC (that's why we were expecting a Beta 3). I'm not making any code changes to handle IE8 until that RC/(Beta 3) comes out because of all the issues still broken in IE8 Beta 2. I don't want to spend any time making workarounds for something you plan to fix in IE8 RC (if you had an up to date public bug tracking database I would know, but we've seen that that path ends in big disappointment) As for critical bugs that need fixes for the RC, add these to the list please.

Page Zoom performance in IE8 is an Epic Fail
SVG Loading in IE8 (w/Adobe SVG plugin) performance is an Epic Fail
HTMLSelect/HTMLOption element modification via CSS or JS is an Epic Fail
UI Customizability in IE8 is still an Epic Fail I hope the time between RC and RTM is at LEAST 3 WEEKS so that we have time to sync up with whatever you actually plan to ship. thanks

Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, has posted today on the IEBlog about what’s
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@steve_web: Thanks for your help in filing bugs. The connect site will be updated with all of the bug fixes, and current status on the issues when the RC build is released. Kellie
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
"Reopen Last Browsing Session" does not work for me. It is always grayed out from within the menu selection and does not appear upon opening IE8 b2 as a selection from the first new tab that is opened. This makes it a non-starter for me. It is a shame as the feature worked fine (opening active tabs the next time IE is started- or whatever the wording) with IE7.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Microsoft hat sich vor der Veröffentlichung einer Beta-Version des kommenden Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) nun doch (einigermaßen überraschend) dazu entschlossen, die ggü. IE6 und IE7 standardkompatiblere Darstellung von Webinhalten standardmäßig zu verwende
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] Hi, here's a rather quirky way of benchmarking specific DOM performance: http://nontroppo.org/timer/progressive_raytracer.html WARNING: If in an IE Browser I would NOT click the 'Full Render' as the browser will freeze up for a very long time and use an excessive amount of memory. Just do the Basic Render to compare it to other browsers. I did this test on full render a couple of months back but the results should still hold true on my computer. My computer has an AMD 3800+ X2 with 2 GB DDR 400MHz RAM: Chrome - 29.69 seconds Opera 9.6RC - 31.609 seconds Safari 3.1.2 - 38.734 seconds Firefox Nightly- 537.907 seconds IE8 Beta 2 - CRASH - Pass 84/120 - 2269.468 seconds Also Memory had increased to over 900 MB by the 84th Pass for IE8 Beta 2, note that each pass was taking longer than the previous pass, so IE8 would have probably taken 2-3 hours to pass the whole thing had it not crashed. I understand it's very very specific and a performance gain here will hardly show up in the same magnitude on normal sites. But I still think it's something worth a quick look at :)
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
I've been using beta 2 for sometime now and here is what I've to say.

JS Engine needs performance improvement. IE 8's JS Engine is much better than IE 7's though.
Switching between tabs is sometimes very slow.
For some reason Vista's DEP feature kills iexplore.exe when exiting the browser. I have no idea why, but because of this the performance monitor's index has fallen to below 2.
Please let the favourites bar to expand vertically (that is to support multiple lines). Now I have to go through the small arrow button (>>) and look for feeds! You guys have done a great job in beta 2. Hope to see much improved and bug fixed IE 8 soon!

Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Ted, please note that HTML5 is designed to be compatible with an XML syntax (i.e., XHTML) as well as a specific HTML syntax. While you'll probably get less argument that XHTML2 is a failure, XHTML itself (HTML in an XML form) does have appeal in a number of applications. Most of them are not on the Web, though, for various reasons obvious and not.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@Damian, Basic render in 2.543 seconds. Full render in 37.768 seconds. IE8 B2 on Vista x86 Business Ed. 4 GB Ram Intel DC 2.20 ghz, NVidia 8500 GT (512 MB)
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
SVG would be a nice feature to get into IE8, thus i think that is already late for IE8 roadmap. Real shame...
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Thanks for the timeline Dean. We now know where we stand. Roughly, at least!
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add a download manager, this is something a lot of people have asked for, for years! And still it doesn't reach you guys, why isn't this feature in already? What is the reason, it would be nice to hear from Microsoft why they haven't done this yet. Now it is pretty annoying that you have to start multiple IE's to download multiple large files or otherwise you can't download them at once as 1 IE only supports 4 concurrent downloads.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
I work for a fortune 50 company. With hundreds of internal-facing web applications and somewhat fewer external-facing web applications, we will probably only take immediate action to fix any incompatibilities in the external-facing we bapplications. For the internal apps, they would not be fixed until a project can be allocated in the next fiscal year. It could be 2010 before everything is compatibility-tested -- there's just far too much out there to do a full regression test without diverting resources on other mission-critical projects. For internal apps where we control the deployment of IE to desktops, it is hard to justify spending money on all the testing and fixing of all those applications until it's absolutely necessary. Also critical to consider is the testing on embedded browser controls in desktop and mobile-deployed fat clients. In any case, while all new development is standards-compliant, there is a major issue with all the old legacy code out there. But that's how software development goes...
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Most wanted features:

Download manager
Customizable (skinnable?) GUI
Support for CSS "opacity" so proprietary filters wouldn't be needed
More speed! Just compare a default IE with Firefox, Safari or Chrome. What will you see? #1 IE takes much longer to start up, even with Superfetch in Vista. #2 Open a new, empty tab. Again: much slower. #3-#99 Left out. Nevertheless IE has improved hugely from IE6 over IE7 to IE8 - but that does not mean that there wasn't much left to do to be on the same level as the other browsers.

Anonymous
November 19, 2008
I vote for FULL CSS 2 compliance. Make the web designer's job easier PLEASE! Also how about Microsoft paying for all IE6 users to be flogged in the town square...??!?
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
"We listen", "we are listening", "we've heard you", and others stupid marketing sentences... You've just heard nobody. Where's beta3 ? Beta2 was unusable and crashed all the time, so we can't test it. Please give us a testable beta before a release candidate. @Nick : forget the download manager, they haven't listened to us. For IE7, they said they will consider the download manager for a future release, now they say the same for IE8. We'll see in IE9... or IE10... @Thales : about SVG, you can get the same answer as Nick...
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
I am not sure if this is specific to my network connection. IE 8 most of times gives "Bad Gateway Error" on my XP machine. On my home PC I have Vista installed and IE 8 works fine. I have no problems with it at all.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
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Anonymous
November 19, 2008
We really really really need a download manager. Everybody wants it. It's the most important missing feature. I'm sure Microsoft can implement it in 1 in 2 weeks... So why is it still missing?
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@ Damian Full run finished in 67,8 seconds on Lenovo Thinkpad T2300. 980Mhz, 1GB RAM... So there might be something wrong with your computer / browser...
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@sebastien What's so important about a download manager? If you need to resume downloads, just click on the same download link. The download will resume where you left off if possible.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Hey Now Dean, I love IE8 beta 2. One thing that I would really like to see is a hotkey to open multiple tabs. If a user goes to the favorite cetner (alt+c) then arrows down to the folder (ctrl+enter) should open the sites in the folder but I've had no success in IE7 or IE8. When you are in the favorite center then hover over the folder with the mouse then on the right of the folder there is a little blue arrow. If this arrow is clicked (no hotkey w/ mouse I mean) then the group of tabs open good. That is a small thing but it is something I think of often. thx 4 the info, Catto christophercatto@hotmailNOSPAM.com
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
Besides the usual feature requests, I would like to point out that I've noticed IE8B2 becoming unstable on quite a few occassions (hang/crash). It is very important that the stability is improved for the final product release. I'll gladly accept a few feature cuts if this results in improved stability.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
@Disk4mat @ajo (also are you sure you did the Full Render for that test? And it did all 120 passes) Are you sure that the result rendered correctly and computation finished? The basic render looks like a pixlelated version of the full render which is a purply sphere. I ran the test again on this computer and after 15 mins of running it was clear I was getting the same kind of performance results. So I went and installed a fresh copy of IE8 on a different computer (AMD 64 single core 2.4GHz, 2 GB DDR2 667MHz). As of pass 66 (still running I'll post the final result later) it's currently taken 448015ms Both computers run other performance benchmarks as expected, they are kept very clean of bloat ware, malware etc... IE is almost never used so it's also kept quite clean. Other people have confirmed my similarity bad performance.
Anonymous
November 19, 2008
thanks for detailed timeline around IE8. we like the IE8 BETA so much so that we have created a little community around it at http://www.spreadie8.com we hope you like the community. we would be glad if you wanted to share any feedback around the same at admin@merawindows.com
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Disk4mat @ajo So yeah, the test on this other computer (AMD 64 single core 2.4GHz, 2 GB DDR2 667MHz) with a fresh install of IE8 Beta 2 crashed in the same place pass 84 and took 1912625 ms The crash did not automatically recover, I had to terminate the iexplorer.exe process. Are you sure you both got up to pass 120 of the full render AND it looked like purple shaded sphere? I find it odd that I can run to separate tests on different computers with different OSes (XP x64 vs. XP) and get the same result and it be wrong...
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Chase Seibert That's like saying that a Ford Edsel is a pretty good car because it's slightly faster than a Ford Model-T. By todays standard the performance of both, IE7 and IE8 beta 2, is simply unacceptable. The only reason why Google even bothered to create Google chrome is due to IE's horrific Javascript and DOM performance which is holding back the web as a platform. IE is so far behind in performance and standards compatibility that I don't know why Microsoft even bothers any more.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I'm wondering if IE8 is going to fix the regression in dealing with offsetParent? If you load this page http://dump.testsuite.org/2006/dom/style/offset/023.htm in IE7 and in IE8, IE8 will show that it failed while IE7 didn't. IE6 passes as well. This bug in IE8 makes it pretty difficult to support IE8.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Hi there I know it has been like this for ages and it's probably too late to address this issue at this stage. However, it is a pain in the ... to have the "script debugging" option enabled, when you browse 3rd party websites (I know, it may come as a surprise that I use the browser both as a developer AND as an end user :-) I would though like to have the Script debugging option enabled when browsing/debugging my own websites - but I don't really bother about other developers script errors. So well, what I am basicly asking for is an option to restrict script debugging to only be enabled for specifik websites (perhaps Zone based). If this is somehow already possible, I appoligize.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
This has been said many times before, so I'll make it simple... We want a Beta 3! Beta 2 was no where near the quality we expected. Before getting to an RC, we want to get the last set of bugs reports before you get to RC1. Closing the door now would be a horrible mistake. Please make sure IE8 ships with the following: SVG + Canvas + CSS2.1 Full compliance. Pretty please?
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
How do I prepare for a new software release? I start by installing the beta or RC, but until it can sit alongside Visual Studio 2003 I can't do this. Have you fixed that yet?
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Mike: Spellcheck is available from at least 2 add-ons (IESpell and IE7Pro). Performance issues with Beta-2's Zoom feature are known and we've been working on performance of Zoom (and across the browser). I'm not sure what you mean by "new IE containers", but if you hit CTRL+N, the current tab is opened in a new browser instance. @Jason Ashdown: As mentioned previously, our goals for IE8 include full CSS 2.1 compliance, which we aim to deliver. We do not plan to natively support SVG or the proposed Canvas tag in IE8. @Daniel: We've received quite a bit of feedback about the script debugging prompts, although most of it is from non-developer users who simply want an easier mechanism to turn it off. You can, of course, reenable script debugging using the dev tools (F12). Stay tuned for the RC. @Trevan: Thanks for the test case. @Gabriel Golcher: Do you see the same problem when IE is run without add-ons? Beta-1 had some serious problems with process management, but most were ironed out before Beta-2. I haven't seen any issues on current builds. @AccessDenied: Fear not, reliability and performance both remain key areas of investment on the part of the IE team. @Catto: You can also middle-click the group to open them all. @sebastien: There are various 3rd party download manager addons available for IE if you haven't tried them. Unfortunately, integrating a proper download manager than handles all of the myriad ways that file downloads take place takes a lot longer than you might think. As syb notes, download resumption has been improved in IE. @Jagannath: Are the Tools / Internet Options / Connections proxy settings the same on both computers? @Dave: As noted in various places, our target is full CSS2.1 compliance. @mynetx: You should take a look at what browser add-ons you have installed. The new Tools / Manage Add-ons UI will show the load time for each of your enabled addons. On a few machines I've tested, both IE and Chrome start almost instantly, and Safari and Firefox take several additional seconds. Slowness in creating new tabs is caused almost exclusively by slow add-ons. @Nick: IE8 supports 6 simultaneous connections per host. Adding more connections usually results in a slower overall experience. But, if you want more, it's trivial to increase the limit. See www.enhanceie.com/ie/tweaks.asp in the "Speed tweaks" section. @Hammad: If IE experiences a DEP crash when closing the browser, this is a signal that you have a buggy add-on that does not shutdown properly. When IE destroys the add-on, the add-on attempts to access already-freed memory and crashes. Remove (or update) the addon and this problem should go away. @Damian Shaw: I hope you'll agree that creating 59000 DIV elements isn't really a good benchmark for overall DOM performance. :-) The problem with optimizing for contrived benchmarks is that the benchmarks often don't map to real-world performance problems. As noted, we focus our performance investments on real-world sites (e.g., GMail) to isolate and remove bottlenecks. @Howie: Have you configured IE to delete browsing history on exit? That's one reason that "Reopen last session" could be unavailable.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I do not care how you do it. Just get this browser out and done well. Make it give me tools I need that I cannot get from Mozilla, Opera or any other browser. If you can not, another browser will. Your job is to make my life easier, not yours! Andale!
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Wasn't this product meant to ship end of year this year? Just checking...
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Dissapointed that there isn't going to be a beta 3 soon. Beta 2 isn't nice to use for more than a few minutes, and I don't think you are going to get much more useful feedback on it now, just the same bugs repeating themselves. Then by the time we get the next public release, you will only be acting on a small number of critical issues as you said, so the opportunity to fix other issues will have been missed.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Not sure if someone has mentioned this or not (because I'm not familiar with the technical reasons for rendering issues), but I have noticed that on one website I help maintain, a logo in the header is consistently not showing until I refresh the pages. On another website I have dealt with, random items on the page do not show up and upon refreshing, they might show up, but others disappear. I have disabled all add-ons but no change. Has anyone else experienced this?
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I've kept using IE8B2, despite the many flaws. I am glad to see you recognize that it wasn't close to done, but am disappointed that we won't see another update before Q1. What about making somehting available via MSDN, since folks paying for that are likely all professional developers? One thing I have is that the debugging just doesn't work. I expect that it will be as easy to use or better than Firebug on Mozilla, without needing to buy or use some VS tool. Getting some update on this would be nice. I've found sesison restore to be flaky and unreliable (yes I know it is btea, but this code is aplha at best). Please publish where the session files are kept and format. When there is some content blocked, I get an info bar, but it doesn;t tell me what the issue was. Please provide details so advanced users can see what the issue is. I'd expect that MS's QA team and employees will try the browser on the top 1000 web sites and will make sure it work on those sites. You have enough staff at the company to do this and your user base deserves this. B2 was a lot better than B1 and so I am looking forward to the RCs and final.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I guess they took my strident feedback about Beta 2 seriously: IE 8 pretty much breaks the Web at this
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Javascript performance. It's no good comparing yourself against IE7 and claim averything is great and ok. In our organization we are starting to move away from IE to other browser choices specifically for standards compliance AND javascript performance I know you are capable of giving us killer Javascript performance but are reluctant to compete with other MS technologies. --jw
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I just ran the basic render test in 60.125 seconds. This is on a plain P4 2.6Ghz with 2mb of PC400 RAM and using the motherboard Intel graphics. Running XP SP3, IE 8 B2. The test ran to completion. Try running in no add ons and retry your test.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Cookies. Some sites logout, I don't know why.Also when XP crashes for any reason, it seems that IE deletes cookies and Temp files I suppose for security, but thats very anoying as I preserve my cookies Images. Some sites are unable to save images in the IE cache : http://agaudi.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/sawdust-diseno-grafico-e-ilustracion/ "save Picture as" tries to save it as bmp Tabs. MMB opens a new tab in the extreme right of the group. it should open it aside the current page, still inside the group refresh button, it sometimes does not work, using the address bar and pressing ENTER is usually better Favorites bar. is it possible to make it like a real menu instead of buttons. and a shorcut to hide/show easily Restore last session. It needs more depth. and be independent of IE cache, because deleting the history makes it obsolete right? Popup blocker. Uses Ctrl+Alt to override, but interfieres with IE menu adress bar.sometimes typing a single word attempts to load it as as url, instead of search Scroll Bars. when the page is loading it looses focus when you are scrolling, I cannot wait for pages to load 100% its a waste of time, can you make it more independent? Animated Gifs, etc. When running IE slow down a lot, for example links, etc Saving Images. IE does not remember the last directory correctly, some tabs do, other tabs suddently remember a different directory. My Pictures. Always opens as thumbnails,anoying!! I suppose plugins are not independent, that makes tabs slow, but IE8 is much better than IE7 but still very beta, even google needs to run in compatibility mode
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
ok so today microsoft said ie 8 well come out in 2009 after the rcs version well what happends to the ppl that have beta 2 installed on there pcs will we get a update from windows update..... aww ie 8 is so much better then ie 7 the loading times r much better its faster and i have no problems with it......
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Wow, awesome! IE8 Beta 2 is already a major improvement from IE8 Beta 1, can't wait till the RC is out :) Great Job!
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Seems there's a bug in the favorites menu, bookmarks (and subfolders) with ampersands doesn't display correctly.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Back in July, Microsoft indicated that there would be one more beta of Internet Explorer 8 and that the final version would ship before the end of 2008. Beta 2 was duly released in August, but yesterday, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch revealed tha..
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@sialivi: I can't repro the ampersand issue in the current build. Can you provide exact repro steps? @Lori: What's the repro URL? @PCause: Can you please be more specific about what problems you've encountered when debugging?
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I wait for the final release and then i will compare the IE 8 with my other browsers.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Side by side install of different versions. Having to run IE6 on a virtual PC is a really annoying.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Since there will be no canvas support in IE8 I would like to see the IE team working with the ExCanvas guys to make sure ExCanvas will function properly in IE8 standards mode. https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=364096 On another topic, it would be nice if ticket comments were not signed anonymously, "Best regards, The IE Team", but with the actual name of the team member writing the comment. It would be nice if tickets were closed as they are resolved, not waiting until the date of the release itself. I would like to see nightly releases. As someone else mentioned above, I also think a beta3 would be a good idea. I am very much concerned about VML continuing to function properly until canvas is supported in a future version of IE.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
With multiple tabs open the task manager gets loaded with "Internet Explorer" descriptions/processes. Unfortunatly since tabs in IE crashes surprisingly quite often it would be nice to know which tab I need to "end process" on to get rid of the non-responsive tab since you can't close it from the browser itself. Knowing which tabbed process is which would help from having to pick and guess to hope you get the right one. Other than that I'm pretty happy. Stability seems to be the biggest issue for my IE8b2
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
In IE8 Beta 2 the default rendering mode for WebBrowser Control is IE7. To force IE8 rendering mode the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMainFeatureControlFEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION must be set to 8. Will this behavior stay the same in the final IE 8 release? Are you going to change this in the future?
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
I am curious if the IE team has any changes to their plan on bug fixing the rendering engine, in case of any. In IE6 and IE7 I see MSFT not going to touch the rendering engine after release, leaving all security unrelated rendering flaws and bugs as they are until the next major release to avoid that so-called "break BC" which already gave enough countless pain to web developers. IE8 is claimed to commit to standards AFAIK. I really think MSFT should evaluate the possibility to continue fixing rendering bugs that are not comply to standard even after the product goes gold.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
the auto recovery may ask the user to recover page or not before it tries to recover. A typical website: crashie.com, which contains some html that can corrupt/full load IE(any version, in XP but not vista). Problem is if i open the website, and find IE not responding, I may close it through task manager (well, another problem, it may be difficult for me to identify those iexplore process belongs to main UI(parent?) or tab). If I correctly "End Process" of that mal function tab, in general IE will recover it without enquire me. So the problem will loop back, IE hangs again.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Please add at least a "No to all" in addition to the "Yes" and "No" choices in the ActiveX / active content prompt dialog. Please also add information on the particular active content in question, such as its name and its certificate, etc. I am referring to the dialogs that are used when IE is set to ask for permission for every single control, such as when going to say, Youtube to watch a video and IE would ask if it's okay to allow ActiveX to run. Another issue is the same kind of prompts showing up on top of pages that they do not originate from. Say you're browsing a news site and you open one of its articles in a new tab. Chances are that the ActiveX controls in the new tab will show up while you're viewing the first page. This is confusing, even for pages that are grouped / related. A third issue, also with ActiveX or active content is when IE seem to want to run active content from say, a news site, when I have just navigated away from the news site and onto a pure HTML / CSS page on my hard drive that has got no risky content what so ever. I'm getting this information bar at the top of the page telling me my page wants to run active content but was stopped. Doesn't make sense. This issue is particularily worrying if I want to sell similar minimalistic pages to customers, it would turn into a support problem as this is too complicated for most customers to have to learn when it should not be necessary. I have mentioned all three issues before. I thought at least the last one was fixed now, but it turned out it was not. Other than that, I'd like to say that I really like IE 8 and the improved standardization. Keep up the good work! IE 8 beta 2.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Damian For certain I get all 120 passes. It slows down after pass 90 but still completes. Just tried it again and finished full render in 41.46 seconds. It may be that on your 2 systems you have 3rd party apps/security/filters that are affecting IE's rendering. Here is a screenshot I snagged at pass 115. Showing open tabs and current progress for pass 115. http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/219/ie8b2rendervw6.jpg
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
my main issue is the lack of a simple ingerated download manager, spell checker and if i am not mistaken, there is no way to view saved passwords. all of the above are simple but effective features from firefox.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Sialivi: Issue confirmed. @EricLaw: To reproduce create a new folder or bookmark with a single & symbol in the name. Example: MS Windows & Vista From the favorites menu the bookmark (or folder) will display an under score. So MS Windows & Vista would display as: MS Windows _Vista The work around is to use a double &&. Example: MS Windows && Vista Screenshot: http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/1557/ampersandvi9.png Note: This bug is also present on the favorites bar when selecting and item that has child items (folder on fav bar that contains bookmarks)
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Make Launch Fast... for e.g. Windows Media Player Light version in windows & beta opens at blazing speed. Normall web surfer has minimum 10- 15 tabs open. Under this, it should perform best. It is still sluggish like vista taking more time in opening windows explorer. Windows 7 did great job in speed..and responsiveness..users expect same from IE 8 Finally, keep it light, fast and responsive....
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] I totally agree creating 59000 DIV elements isn't a good general benchmark for DOM performance and I was very careful about never stating such :-). Still, it does highlight bugs with the IE layout engine and it also impedes how creative web developers can be. No one will ever do anything similar for a web page, not necessarily because it's not a good idea but simply because IE can't handle it.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
@Disk4mat Thank you very much for the information, I simply can't explain why it works well on some but not on others. The only particular difference I notice is the use of Intel CPUs vs. AMD CPUs. I'd find it odd that IE work so radically different on them though.
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
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Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Regarding XHTML being a failed spec, it really isn't. Just because IE doesn't parse the stuff, that doesn't mean that it is a failed spec. Many people are doing things like switching to Linux, which helps Firefox's case mostly or Mac, which helps Safari. In addition, even people who are sticking with Windows are switching. I'm not saying it is a mass movement, but there are certainly fewer IE users than there were a year ago. As for the status of XHTML 2.0, it appears to be picking up the pace again. They're beginning to figure out what to do with the language by figuring out exactly how certain features should be decided. In my opinion, XHTML 2.0 would be quite beneficial to developers, but I'm only one person... Even if XHTML 2.0 doesn't get implemented by any user-agents, there will always be XSLT... ^_^
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
About the download manager : clicking on the same url to resume a download is not always possible. Actually most of the sites I use have automatic mirrors. And sometimes, downloads are corrupted, so you may want to have a donwload manager which lists URLs you already downloaded. I tried several 3rd party download managers, none works 100% for all the links. Well, I will still use IE but it's weird to add gadgets while a basic functionality is still several years late
Anonymous
November 20, 2008
Full CSS2.1 compliance is not enough to gain the respect of web developers and designers, it's important to fix as many rendering bugs as possible before final release. Otherwise we'll be worse off than we are now. Spend some time on this page [1], and fix every bug you can, much like you did with PiE.net for IE7 [2].

Anonymous
November 21, 2008
EricLaw: Thank you for the prompt reply, looking forward to see what you have planned for the RC. Noticed a small bug where text is able to wrap inside an <input type="submit"> button. FireFox: http://temp.frenz.dk/dev/ff.jpg IE8: http://temp.frenz.dk/dev/ie8.jpg Just to let you know, if you wasn't aware of it :)
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Top News Stories SharePoint Migration in the Hands of the Content Owner? (ITWorld) Let Business Users
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Suggestion: IE8 drop down menu are too cluttered and some function have too many launch surface (Accelerator can be accessed via 4 places) I have uploaded my suggestion to Scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/8247186/Internet-Explorer-Menu-Bar-Improvements hope you will concern
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate erscheint Anfang 2009
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Please stop fixing your terrible layout engine and just use Webkit or Gecko. You make web developer's life a nightmare on a regular basis.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Something that would be really helpful to me as a designer/developer would be to have a split view browser for tabs with two widescreen monitors. In otherwords like in Visual studio you can have File one next to File Two as a splitscreen. With Tabs already an option in IE, being able to see 2 or even more would be super slick. Instead of having to open up two different IE browsers. In Win7 you go half way with the idea of wanting a split screen where you can quickly set two apps to split the screen width, now just bring it inside the browser.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@EricLaw: I have a repo for the performance issue. Where would you like me to send it?I already submitted it to the "Email" link on this blog.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
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Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Thanks for the answer. The first part of question was actually if the IE7 will continue to be the default rendering mode for the WebBrowser control as it is now in Beta 2 or this will change in the future? Thanks and good luck with the next releases.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Oh, first quarter of 2009? Surely that means March 31, like Beta 2 was released in "mid August" on the 28th.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
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Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT]: I'm just a bit critical. I mean, there are going to be 3 milstones between IE7 and IE8. Opera brings out a build every few weeks, Mozilla brings out an alpha or beta every few months, and also nightly builds like Apple. It's clear to me that nightlies or weeklies aren't possible here. But I think if more milestones would be released, like every 3 months, that'd be much more useful than to wait another six months. Like, less bugs that are actually fixed internally get filed over and over again. More milestone releases could result in more and better tester driven QA. At least, that's what I think.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Mozilla also has open weekly status calls for Mozilla as a whole, the Platform, and for Firefox... Anyone can call in, read the agenda, or see the updates on the wiki. IE8 should be out around the same time as Firefox 3.1. So much for IE8 and Firefox 3 coming out around the same time. :-)
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@Al Billings: Mozilla is the only one who publishes roadmaps, and they never keep to it. However, the release regularily, and I think that's great.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Make it fast, really fast! (Rendering, DOM Modification, Javascript, ...) The overall performance should be the same as Fx3 or even better. That's a really critical thing for people who try to build complex web applications.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@Tomas, you expect that roadmaps are set in stone? They are guidelines but at least they are public. Just about every meeting and every discussion is open to the public if they choose to call in or read the wiki. :-)
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@EricLaw, @Dean Hachamovitch Bugzilla is a software that is widely acknowledged as excellent for community feedback for lots of companies and groups. I would welcome replacing the current IE beta connect with Bugzilla. Over 800 companies, including NASA and W3C, so far have done so. If IE 7 was 3-4 years behind other browsers (Firefox 2, Opera 9), then the first version of IE beta connect was 10 years behind Bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org/about/ www.bugzilla.org/features/ www.bugzilla.org/installation-list/ @EricLaw, @Daniel Møller Chances are it was a bug in IE 7 and described here: www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/inherited_margin.html Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
La versión definitiva de Internet Explorer no llegará hasta después del primer trimestre del año próximo. El pasado verano Microsoft anuncio su intención de lanzar la versión final de Internet Explorer 8 para finales del presente año, algo que finalme
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@Al Billings: Actually I wanted to say, that this is the problem. A roadmap, given for final products, or so vague like in IE's case is not ever to be trusted. But at least, the other browser vendors got some regular releases. IE gets release pauses from 3 months to over 1 year. Thats counterproductive imho. @Gérard Talbot: I personally doubt they'll use Bugzilla in the future. I've seen wonders though. What concerns me more is, that the information flow ist just so restricted. We are only intermittently informed about what things wont't make it into IE8 Final. But if it's not implemented in a released milestone, we can only guess. For example, we already know, that text/css won't be properly supported. Because someone filed a bug which was closed later. Do we know wether bugfix X or fix Y will make it? Even if they're already fixed, the answer is no..
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Tripe like "we already know, that text/css won't be properly supported" is worth than worthless. Obviously, IE supports stylesheets. If you're suggesting that IE doesn't refuse stylesheet references that don't contain the expected Content-Type, or something of that nature, why don't you explicitly say so?
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
I just hope and pray that one day addEventListener will work in IE. We've been developing for FF/Safari as our primary target. Usually stuff "just works" the first time in both. Strangely enough, Opera usually just works too (though it's not a primary test target). We then spend a few days hacking everything up for IE. It's at the point now where we're degrading the experience for IE because it's too much work to deal with the standards-compliant crowd PLUS IE. Our customers get the best experience in FF, but it works well enough in IE that they don't complain.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
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Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@Gerard, I too have tested well over 50% of the bugs listed on your page as well as other at other sites. All were bugs, either in a really obvious way, or when comparing to the specs became very clear. IE has always had a public image issue, and today is no different. IE is the AOL of web browsers... it works, it does get on the Internet, but man o man does the experience pale in comparison to any other browser. As for me personally, I want to know what issues are confirmed as fixed and in for the RC. If you tell us (or worse yet, say nothing) and just release the RC, we're all going to have to make a mad scramble to figure out what we need to fix and what was actually fixed in IE. Please verify the status of ANY BUGS that have been fixed since Beta 2. ============================================ THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT INFO THAN ANY OTHER POSSIBLE BLOG POST YOU CAN DREAM UP AT THE MOMENT. ============================================ thank you
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Issues resolved: "By design" are an indication that the feature team does not believe the issues cited represent valid bugs. In some cases, you list reasonable feature requests, but misrepresent these as "bugs." By that metric, any software without an infinite number of features is infinitely buggy. Issues #1,#2,#40 concern Favicons, a feature invented by the Internet Explorer team many years ago. The fact that subsequent "specifications" were authored by others that were incompatible with the existing design reflects a flaw in the authorship of those documents, not a flaw in IE. #27: The ECMAScript 3 specification describes no implementation of the "const" keyword, noting that it is reserved only for use in a future specification. #86: This issue isn't present if the QuickTime player (which steals the img/png file association) is not installed.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
My way of preparing a new browser launch is to give a quick test to beta, check what does it breaks and report it in their bug database. When they fix those regressions I might check the new nightly and verify that they do indeed work and so I might be able to further check if everything is working as expected, it might even replace the stable version as my current browser as the improvements in every new browser are very nice. Unfortunately in IE case it means waiting several months and hoping that they fix all the reported problems. Meanwhile I keep on developing with Firefox and then readjusting the pages for the non-standards loving browser.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
We have the same mad scramble to address incompatibilities at RTM. For example, right now our tree view works fine in IE8/XP, but not with IE8/Vista. Diverting resources for beta compatibility has not been of value to us in the past. We need a long RC to RTM period.
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@EricLaw > "By design" are an indication that the feature team does not believe the issues cited represent valid bugs. In some cases, you list reasonable feature requests, but misrepresent these as "bugs." A lot of people reporting bugs or going through the connect IE beta feedback bug reports may disagree then. Spec violation or unsupported property, attribute, method will represent valid bug in their mind. Eg Not being able to select text or viewport unexpectedly jumping/moving back to top of document view is a bug (#197) IMO... but nowhere will you find an official spec stating something like that. > In some cases, you list reasonable feature requests In some cases, I list absence of support otherwise clear spec violations (including UAAG 1.0). Sometimes backed up by MSDN's own documentation. Sometimes I identify a serious accessibility, usability, annoyance problem too (#197). > Issues #1,#2,#40 concern Favicons Issue #1 is about requesting a file that has not been explicitly linked to begin with: my verdict is that's unjustified and not recommendable. And the bug I see has been sufficiently explained, documented and substantiated by others and elsewhere. The original feature invented by the Internet Explorer team in that issue should be upgraded, corrected for the better, for the future and for everyone involved. Issue #2: The original feature invented by the Internet Explorer team in that issue should be upgraded, corrected/adjusted to meet, to be compliant with 1999's HTML 4.01 HTML 4 specification, rel attribute value (link-types) www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#adef-rel That's what I am saying. And " 'Shortcut icon' instead of 'icon', now that was definitely a simple oversight. " blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2007/03/01/why-doesn-t-the-favicon-for-my-site-appear-in-ie7.aspx#1832378 is actually exactly what you have been saying, Eric. Issue #27: I have been told that " ECMAScript 3 (ECMA 262-3), which does not list such a construct. The upcoming version 3.1 will include const " bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170070 So this one changed (or will change) from reasonable enhancement request (for compatibility purposes) to absence of support for a standard (ECMAscript 3.1). Issue #40: either IE7+ supports PNG natively or it does not. Notwithstanding other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc) support's for PNG and favicon/webpage icons. Issue #40 is an enhancement request and it's certainly a fair and reasonable one. Issue #86: This issue has been already FIXED according to T. Leithead (in an email dated november 4th 2008), so, why mention it here and now? If it was not a bug according to formal and strict definition, it certainly was an obstacle/annoyance/irritation issue. Also, I did NOT have QuickTime installed at all when I got that yellow information bar prompt. If all you can bring to substantiate your " > A significant number of the "bugs" on the page you cited are not actually bugs. " is 5 issues, then this will certainly look like quite a stretch. Gérard Talbot
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
The Internet Explorer 8 team has announced that a release candidate (RC) will be available to the public
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
I hesitate to use even upgraded versions of Chrome, since my last experience using it (first version) left my computer compromised; have they fixed the security issues beyond all doubt?
Anonymous
November 21, 2008

It gobbles resources
The tool bar, links, and other in the same area does not display
It is slower to open than IE7 Since it is going to take so long to get to the next lever, I am going to uninstall IE8. The aggrevation is not worth it.

Anonymous
November 21, 2008
Please IE Team! Improve/Get the following things: Speed! Browsing speed. Use Allot Less RAM. Have performance great Have features for everyone A Download manager. Better Add-On Support XHTML Support If you add all this and make it light weight like Google Chrome. I would use IE 100 percent. But i can't. It's a 40 percent till it gets these stuff. I know people that would like the stuff that i listed
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
I do agree that XHTML support would be a good thing, but I honestly don't think MSXML is up to the challenge. It really isn't IE's fault, and that's probably why they won't support it - they simply are unable to do so. If you want some semblance of XHTML support, you might try to deliver it as XML (i.e. use application/xml), and check out the following page for some workarounds that deal with XHTML 1.1 - http://www.satoshii.org/markup/dtd/xhtml11-msxml.en You should be able to note only the MSXML3-related issues on that page since MSXML 2.x isn't used nearly as much anymore (IE defaults to MSXML3 AFAIK). However, it won't work in IE 8.0b2! For some reason, it chokes on one of the XHTML 1.1 modules. Turn on Compatibility mode, and it displays the document tree like normal. Could this be a bug? ^_^
Anonymous
November 21, 2008
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Anonymous
November 21, 2008
@Dave: >>If you're suggesting that IE doesn't refuse stylesheet references that don't contain the expected Content-Type, or something of that nature, why don't you explicitly say so?<< I definitely need more practice in the english language. It looks like you got my point though. This is a violation of CSS 2.1, the only clear goal for IE8. The report was WON'T FIXED.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
Just please do your best to start pecking away at Firefox and Google Chrome. Seriously. You guys are a group of extremely smart people... I'm sure guys can do something (and gals... no offense to any girls on the team). Also, would be cool if you could do the "shift+enter" to .NET and "control+shift+enter" to go to .ORG. Doesn't make sense why it wouldn't be there + it would be a helpful addition.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
Control+shift+enter is customisable from Internet Options > General > Language which is very handy for people to set their local suffix, or whatever one they use regularly.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
OK I'm tired of beta testing and waiting I will go back to FF3.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
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Anonymous
November 22, 2008
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Anonymous
November 22, 2008
EricLaw: The button is styled using CSS, the checkbox is not really important here (maybe I shouldn't have included it in the images). The input tag looks like this: <input type="submit" name="loginKnap" value="Log ind" class="navLoginButton" tabindex="4" /> CSS Class: .navLoginButton { margin-top: 1px; margin-left: 5px; width: 55px; height: 19px; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; background-color: transparent; background-position: right; color: white; border: 0px; cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; } We were able to get around the text wrapping with an   instead of a space character. Replacing: value="Log ind" with value="Log ind" Some of the CSS settings may not be optimal, but I don't suppose text should be able to wrap inside a button at all?
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I must say, having done some testing with the beta, I am definitely impressed with how much better IE8's rendering of various things is than IE7's, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing it out. Indeed, as a web developer I'd really like to see it hit automatic updates so I can start expecting users to have it. On the other hand, though, I can sure understand the desire to not release it until it's stable. (I'm a Debian user myself and still using iceweasel 2, so you know I understand about stability requirements and the need for patience.) So in the long term the slower release cycle you've planned is probably for the best. Just don't make it too long ;-) NM: SVG would admittedly be really nice to have, but it's also a big spec and would take a lot of time to implement. Firefox is still only partway there after working on it for a couple of years. So I'd say SVG is best left for IE9 (or 8.5, or whatever numbering goes on the next release after 8). Besides, you don't normally do major feature work after putting out the betas. Focus on getting IE8 out the door first, and then worry about stuff like SVG for next release. Actually, even the performance issue Stan was talking about, provided it's not significantly worse than IE7, doesn't need to be fixed for the first release of 8.0. If it's going to take more time, do it in a point update ex post release. Ted, HTML5 is mostly just to help keep the holdouts who aren't ready for XML yet from falling completely out of step with the modern web. XHTML has significant practical advantages and is not going anywhere. (Among other things, you can't mix XML namespaces like RDF or SVG into an HTML5 document, but with XHTML you can, and people have already been doing this for a couple of years. Also, wellformedness makes XML much easier to parse than SGML, which makes XHTML markup much more maintainable than traditional HTML, especially when it's contructed dynamically from bits and pieces provided by different code in different places.) The people moving to HTML5 are moving mostly from HTML4, not from XHTML. And actually, IE mostly supports XHTML okay, but it needs to recognize the content-type and a couple of other details like that. Currently most XHTML content has to be served out as text/html because of this issue.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I've been able to reproduce it here: http://temp.frenz.dk/dev/test.htm If first bugs when I add the XHTML 1.0 Transitional Doctype. Works fine in IE7 Compatibility mode - but wraps in IE8 mode.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
Regarding the script debugger it would be really nice if we could specify that it should always be enabled for specific domains, but disabled for all others - perhaps as a setting in the developer toolbar.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
Found my first bug submitted to IE to finally have the status changed correctly !!!!! Status: Resolved (Postponed) As in, for now they are doing nothing to fix it, but they at least acknowledge that it still does need fixing, thus is on the list for IE9 fixes. Only took MSFT 5 years, but now you seem to be getting it! PS the bug was 336252. http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=336252 Setting .innerHTML on a select element still fails in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, and now IE8. Just for the record, I do think that this kind of fix would likely only take 5min to fix. I can't see what is so hard about this. Maybe you could post the C++ code and we could help you figure out the bug?
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
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Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@Jonadab the Unsightly One: Just FYI, HTML5 is not SGML. It's merely inspired by SGML, but actually its very own syntax and parsing is defined in the spec/draft.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I'm for one amused by reading comments here about how SVG is a-must. What's with that obssession or are they same people over and over :p
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@Daniel Møller, EricLaw: No specification supported by IE8 specifies in any detail how form elements are to be presented. For example, "CSS 2.1 does not define which properties apply to form controls and frames, or how CSS can be used to style them. User agents may apply CSS properties to these elements. Authors are recommended to treat such support as experimental. A future level of CSS may specify this further."[1] Hence, browsers are free to do as they wish with the presentation of form elements. The historical non-wrapping, truncated overflow behaviour of (input-)buttons as implemented by most (all?) released browsers to date is horrible because these browsers also prevent overriding this behaviour via CSS. IE8's wrapping behaviour is welcome because it corresponds to web authors' expectations; where else outside of <pre> does text not wrap by default? Moreover, if required, it /is/ possible to achieve non-wrapping by CSS (or by using no-break spaces as Daniel suggests). [1] Section 3.2 of http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/conform.html
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
IMHO, IE8 Beta2 is still not the killer IE, that the users are expecting. Lot's of rough edges adn missing features. Frankly, we want to surf the net, store book marks and be done. Who wants to muck around with 1000IE settings and options. It's a sad state of too many choices and legacy features. Feels like a patchwork on top after all. Sorry guys.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
> text/css won't be properly supported. Because someone filed a bug which was closed later. Just so that everyone can understand and follow previous comments from Tomas and Dave: Bug 364028: External stylesheet not labeled text/css must be ignored. connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=364028 was Closed and resolved as Won't Fix Relevant reduced testcase on this: www.webdevout.net/testcases/css-content-type/ HTTP response headers for that stylesheet: web-sniffer.net/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webdevout.net%2Ftestcases%2Fcss-content-type%2Fstyle.css&submit=Submit&http=1.1&gzip=yes&type=GET&uak=0 Relevant specification section: www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/conform.html#text-css indicates that stylesheet should be served as text/css and not as text/plain or served with an incorrect MIME-type such as "application/x-pointplus" Also HTML 4.01, section 14.6 Linking to style sheets with HTTP headers: www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.6 Tomas, you're right. They should have just futured, latered, postponed that bug. Even just leaving it with status: Active along with a "At this time we do not plan on fixing this issue. We will consider this in the future release of IE." typical comment was more sensible, careful than closing+wontfix-ing it. Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
No SVG, minimal PNG, and buggy GIF support? Puhleeze. From the point of view of a web dev the conversation goes something like this: look at all these cool charts and things that I can easily make from within our webapp framework. I can even embed them in a PDF and it'll print beautifully. You don't even need a crufty plugin for your browser! You're using IE? Oh. Sorry, Microsoft wants to lock you into their proprietary technology that nobody will ever use instead. You'll have to look at the ugly version of the page. Political garbage aside, Internet Explorer will be further behind if you don't support what everyone else does. You IE devs claim to listen to feedback, yet you ignore all the cries for standards compliance and feature parity with other browsers. All we lowly devs get back is drek that's been filtered a few times through your PR department. Every once in a while you'll do something in the name of standards compliance. Something like rename a bunch of CSS properties, so now there are what? three? cases you've got to support to handle proprietary MS CSS extensions? Ugh.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@Steve, They fixed 2 bugs regarding the add() method for adding options to a select: See bugs #14 and #72 at my webpage. So there is a workaround, a web standards one (innerHTML is not anywhere in DOM 1 & 2) for adding options. Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@Kellie [MSFT] re: "Thanks for your help in filing bugs. The connect site will be updated with all of the bug fixes, and current status on the issues when the RC build is released." I understand that some things are still being worked on, however the connect site needs to be updated before the release. e.g. if window.onresize will not be fixed by the RC, then many of us need to redesign our sites to make a downgraded version for IE8. I would certainly hope that we wouldn't need to do this, but there are still many fairly big regression bugs that are going to cause us a lot of grief if they are not fixed. Knowing up front, what things have been fixed will allow us to prioritize on what workarounds we need to put in to make our applications and web sites work in IE. thanks
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@Gérard Talbot: yes, glad to see the .add() method is fixed, but I find it surprising that the browser that added the .innerHTML property is the only one that doesn't seem to support it on every element (theres at least 3 that IE fails on) Since setting the .innerHTML renders much faster, and in the past IE had so many issues setting attributes, using .innerHTML became the status quo. Was just hoping that there would be a fix for this... and for Tables too.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I think it's cool that MS is considering dropping IE (Trident?) and shifting to a better (open source) engine, like Webkit... http://gizmodo.com/5079630/ballmer-on-webkit-we-may-look-at-that http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/06/microsofts_ballmer_considers_using_webkit_within_ie.html At least then you'd come close to achieving parity with the other browsers on the market, all of whom are giving your browser efforts a serious paddlin' in the web standards, functionality, and performance stakes... and doing so on budgets at least an order of magnitude smaller than yours... wonder what the MSFT shareholders make of that... I recommend certainly recommend an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach - something that open source encourages. Anyway, Microsoft - admitting defeat is probably the best way to get yourselves out of this rather embarrassing IE browser mess.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I'm struck, reading the above comments, by the fact that just about all of them are from developers/users who are requesting that IE8 support features that neither IE6 nor 7 support, but all other browsers do. I though MS were supposed to be innovators... I fail to see innovation. I just see catch-up with the leaders, and I see the failure of the MS development model.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
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Anonymous
November 22, 2008
Don't waste time on Xhtml, canvas of SVG or a download manager. Concentrate on de standards compliance and the user experience of the browser. I have seen on Gerard Talbot pages at least 30 or 40 still open standards related bugs and even if the IE team does not consider all of them bugs that would leave at least 20-30 standard bugs that should be fixed. Especially those that are regressions form earlier versions. Make sure that the browser feel faster and correct all issues to do with the user experience.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
> Don't waste time on Xhtml, canvas of SVG or a > download manager. > ... > Make sure that the browser feel faster and correct > all issues to do with the user experience. I agree with all but the last one. The team doesn't just have us developers to think about; they need to make sure the user experience is good too, as noted in the last of the quoted lines above. A download manager would be a welcome addition for users. Even something as simple as Firefox 3's DM would work. You can pause, resume and cancel unfinished downloads, and you can clear finished/cancelled downloads with the click of a button. That would be enough, and it shouldn't take too long to add if it is that minimalist. As for the standards-compliance with regards to XHTML and SVG, I agree. Those can wait. As for HTML 5 features such as the canvas element and the canvas API, those could wait too. After all, it's just a draft right now, and it could change at any time.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
SVG is a real must for the kind of corporate reporting web apps that my team has to work on. If Microsoft can't implement this in time, please work with a third party to include at least some support as a plugin (license a plugin from a third party, and ship it). If IE8 doesn't deliver at least SVG+XHTML, it will definitely be dead (completely gone) in my organisation by Q3 2009. In order of importance, I would like to see the following: MathML, proper XHTML, and Canvas.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I have tried ie 8 beta 1 and 2 and niether one would ever open up. It is all i know of that has problems on my comoputer. i have a dual core amd x86 vista ready laptop Hp dv9008nr.. any suggestions? Thanks Miles
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
I would like to see interim release / "CTP" or whatever in the next month.
Anonymous
November 22, 2008
@jrsmith: There's no need to wait. It's already clear that IE8 won't include any XHTML/SVG/MathML support. If that weren't the case, these features would already be visible in Beta 1 and 2. Personally, I'm happy that my company recently upgraded to IE7 (hope they'll wait not that long to ship IE8). But we're free to use another browser anyway.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
There are some function in IE8 that I miss: In Firefox: When Firefox ask you if it should remember your password. It pops up a menu with different choises. I like this MUCH better than the one in IE. Also, in firefox, it will login to your account before you have answered if it will remember or not. In ie you have to answer first. That bad... So get some inspiration from Firefox guys! Firefox have a lot of addons. I miss this in IE. In Firefox I have an YouTube Downloader. I love it! It makes it much easier to save movies on the internet. In Firefox 3.1 they have added a new Ctrl + Tab function. Now it looks much more like the Shift + Tab. That function is much better than their old and yours. You should do the same! Exept from that I love IE8! So good luck guys!
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
@Dustin A download manager is not needed. Downloading and resuming of downloads works fine in IE8 and is more than enough for nearly all users. Users that need more can always download a download manager plugin. @jrsmith If SVG is a real must and you can''t use alternative methodes your tooling is inflexible at best. Als I wonder how you accept that no browser has full SVG support yet.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
@Dean Who are you listening to your boss? Because you haven't been listening to the Beta Testers. The only thing Microsoft has been able to say to Beta testers is"NO" So much for changing, listening and learning from your mistakes. What happened to "Life with out Walls" As far as IE 9's UI customization I predict it will be a nice big fat wide ribbon, it will be Microsoft's way. Ted is right about complaining to Apple, because Microsoft has become Apple, just say NO
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
I know what IE 8 needs to succeed, The "Mojave Experiment" of it's very own.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
Hola..,recien me entere que salio esta nueva version.......la testeare de inmediato a ver que tal funciona. Saludos, Martin. Argentina.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
Stop asking for SVG and Canvas, as well as proper DOM support and fast JavaScript engine. You will not see them even in IE10 because they may hurt Silverlight.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
I'm very satisfied with the Beta 2. But there is one thing I miss: a good and safe passwordmanager that also works on sites that have turned autocomplete off. Now I use WebReplay passwordmanager and I don't understand why such a program can't be built in IE. I mean, today passwords must be used everywhere and they must be complex. Yes there is Windows CardSpace but this good solution (IMO) is hardly used.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
In the final version, could you please make IE8 available for Greek x64? Thank you.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
Al Billings, when you come over to troll on the IEBlog, you probably should use a signature that indicates you work for Mozilla. Dave, you have no idea what the IE team's budget is, nor, I suspect, do you have any idea how much Apple, Google, and others spend on Webkit. If you read what Ballmer actually said, he merely pointed out that Microsoft is always interested in what open source products are up to. steve, I'm entirely confident that they'll fix the resize event. The IE team isn't going to break the web, that's the whole point of taking so long to release. Alex, when you say stupid, unsubstantiated things like "buggy GIF support", no one will take you seriously. If you have a complaint, build a test case and file a bug. Gerard, I'd imagine they "won't fixed" the bug because they have no intention of EVER fixing it. There's little point in breaking the web just to comply with a poorly thought-out standard. Even HTML5 allows for content-type sniffing. Sisl, I suspect you're right, and most people complaining about SVG support don't understand that other browsers are far from full support either. This is partly due to the SVG specification being dramatically overcomplicated. We don't need yet another way to do form in the browser, for instance. Jonadab, consider reading http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-html5xhtml2.html and the HTML5 working group charter, and what the WG had to say about XHTML. IE doesn't support XHTML (no verification, case-sensitivity, etc), although if the content happens to look enough like regular HTML, the parser accepts it anyway.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
I have been experiencing the same rendering issue Lori pointed out (comment http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/11/19/ie8-what-s-after-beta-2.aspx#9129847) Some page elements (images, text parts, etc.) are not fully displayed (or displayed at all) untill I click on the page or refresh it. It is really really annoying. It happens with a lot of web sites, for example when searching on Google or with Wordpress-based blog posts. (This rendering issue does not happen when the compatibility view mode is turned on) P.S.: I am running IE8 Beta 2 on Windows XP SP3.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
Ted, if Steve Ballmer merely pointed out that Microsoft is always interested in what open source products are up to, then Bugzilla as a global bug tracking and reporting system for all Microsoft products, not just IE, is definitely an excellent opportunity/possibility. Big corporations (eg NASA) have done so. Bug 348537 connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=348537 was Closed and WONTFIX-ed while the comment from IE team clearly indicates IE team intends/wants to fix it. In any case, to pass acid3 test implies to fix bug 348537. Bug 348575 connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=348575 was WONTFIX-ed. But the comment clearly indicates that the bug is valid and will need to be fixed. If Microsoft had Bugzilla installed and properly configured, then this bug 348575 would have been futured with a milestone/target like IE 9 (or 8.5) and with "highrisk" keyword added: the status would remain as it was: ACTIVE and not closed. Fixing bugs should still remain a priority for many reasons. Remember that IE is widely in use (~=71% worldwide) and there never was any place to report bugs in IE for proper tracking and analysis during many years (1997-2005). @fionbio I think you're absolutely right. Implementing SVG and canvas does not make sense with investing time, energy, resources of all kinds in Silverlight. DOM 2 Events will be implemented in IE 9 (or IE 8.5) because the DOM 2 Events model is more versatile, much more powerful than IE event model. Web authors will want + demand it more than SVG. SVG will hit performance and memory footprint and not everyone would want to see SVG animations. A more nuanced, flexible, less commital approach makes more sense: develop a SVG plugin first in IE 9 and then see how it goes/what happens. Anyway, Microsoft has other plans (Silverlight) besides SVG. Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
XP SP3, on Thinkpad T60 Since mid-October, my Favorites Center button stopped working. (The "Favorites" on the menu bar works.) The flyout does not work at all. A quick internet search reveals that there are a few similar incidents. Are you aware of this problem? If so, will the fix be included in the next beta release?
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
Need for speed! Obviously the all known bugs must be fixed before release and as importent, IE8 must be faster than all its competitors. That by the way goes for Windows 7 too. Speed is the key for success, the key for microsofts future as a leading competitor in this business.
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
"We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that
Anonymous
November 23, 2008
The Internet Explorer 8 team has announced that a release candidate (RC) will become available to the
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@EricLaw I sent an email to the blog with the repro/website info. @net Thank you for confirming I'm not the only one seeing the problem. @jonadab I have tested these two sites in several browsers: IE6, IE7, Firefox 2 & 3 (pc and mac), Safari (pc and mac), Opera, Chrome. I only see the issue in IE8 - beta 2. I have Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 2.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Are there plans for a virtual pc download of IE 8?
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@Jenn: See www.enhanceie.com/ie/webdev.asp#vpc for links to all of the VirtualPC images, including the IE8B2 image. @Sue-Jean: Do you see this problem if you start IE in no-addons mode? www.enhanceie.com/ie/troubleshoot.asp#crash explains how. @eghost: IE8 has millions of beta-testers, and as Dean has elaborated above, there are lots of ways in which their feedback has shipped the product. No product ever includes every feature from every individual's wishlist (not even mine!) but we strive to delight the greatest number of people as often as possible. IE8 represents a significant leap over IE7, and we'll continue our efforts into IE9.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
To EricLaw: First, thanks for your interest. This morning EST, I found this fix: http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.html?forumID=14&threadID=314256&messageID=2894995. As of yesterday, I saw the no-flyout problem with Favorites Center with or without addons. Curiously enough, at work, I use XP Professional SP3 on Thinkpad T61 and have had no comparable problem. I doubt that the problem is related to certain Thinkpad models, though, because the original poster on the C-Net thread had an eMachine. For Vista users, there appears to be a workaround: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=380601.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
At www.milestechnologies.com we prepare by alerting the employees and making time available to answer questions and anticipate individual issues.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
At www.milestechnologies.com we prepare by alerting the employees and making time available to answer questions and anticipate individual issues.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Been using IE8 B2 since it was released, and other then a few crashes and incompabilities it was a good experience. I would love to see a different Favorites bar. Especially the History area is not very user friendly (even a browser tab with a grid and search/filter ability would be far better). More speed is always welcome. Good job so far otherwise.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
The developer tools are a nice addition but it seems to me it is missing an obvious piece of functionality - the ability to inspect request/response headers. Any chance this could be added before IE8 ships? Or is this feature in there and I'm just not finding it?
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
I'd like to see the Command Bar share the same space with the Favorites Bar. I usually don't have that many favorites on this bar but I usually have lots of tabs open.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Hey guys, just wanted to give ya the heads up that I am ready with my IE8.css style sheet for your wonderful browser.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@KeithH: Adding lightweight header inspection to the developer tools is a feature request we've gotten a few times. The devtools team concentrated on adding value in places where they could uniquely do so, and the result is the new script debugger and profiler. For examining HTTP traffic, I'd suggest you take a look at Fiddler (www.fiddler2.com). Fiddler offers much more than just header-viewing: You can also modify traffic (manually or automatically) as it flows across the network, enabling a much richer set of testing. You can collect HTTP/HTTPS traffic captures and archive it to files (see www.fiddlercap.com too) for later viewing or comparison. You can use Fiddler to modify the performance characteristics of traffic (e.g. what does my site look like on a modem) and can view timing charts to understand how your site is downloaded. There are a set of tutorial videos for Fiddler here: www.fiddler2.com/fiddler/help/video/ Beyond Fiddler, there are a number of header inspector plugins that work directly within IE (e.g. HTTPWatch) if that's how you prefer to work. @Sue-Jean: Thanks for the notes. We're looking into the Connect bug.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Is Compatibility View fixed yet? In beta 2, if you add www.xyz.govt.nz to the compatibility list then it adds the entire govt.nz second-level domain instead of just the one site. This is the second time that I've mentioned the issue on this blog but nobody replied to the first one so I'd like to just make sure that you know about the problem. I also posted the same problem to the NZ IE8 blog (blogs.msdn.com/nzie8) and my comment was deleted. That doesn't bode well...
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@Behodar: Thanks for the note; I'm not sure why your comment wasn't posted. Yes, the issues with the .NZ domain are known. The challenge with the .NZ domain is that it's not set up in the typical ccTLD fashion, which means that it's difficult to reliably know which part of the FQDN is the TLD. Stated another way: "There is no algorithmic method of finding the highest level at which a domain may be registered for a particular top-level domain (the policies differ with each registry)." (publicsuffix.org) We'll have more to say on this topic in the RC1 timeframe.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
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Anonymous
November 24, 2008
stalepie: You don't "have to" beta test anything. You get to beta test browsers because there's no other way to test a product this complex. If you don't understand why that is, you probably should not bother reading the IE Blog, just wait a few months and install the release version like the hundreds of millions of other "normal" users. (By almost any metric (market cap, revenue per year, number of users, etc) Microsoft smashes Google.)
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
In order for Internet Explorer 8 to be finished it has to be beta tested. Beta testers are not getting paid. We are the guinea pigs. Don't you at least find this rude that both Google and Microsoft indulge in this behavior?
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
I guess it doesn't matter since we're not paying for it. It's not like a video game where you pay $40 dollars for it and expect it to work.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@stalepie: I fail to see your point... Why would beta testers get paid to test free products? We're the guinea pigs because we're the ones that care enough to make our pages work in a variety of browsers, including browsers that will be released in the coming months such as IE8. If you don't dare to care to prepare, then why are you on IEBlog? Care to enlighten us as to what your purpose for complaining is?
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
I hope I can create my own search provider just like in IE7. It is not officially supported although http://www.enhanceie.com is still available.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
As a user I have used Beta 2 since it's release in August to try to provide the IE Team with usage statistics. After three months of using IE Beta 2 as my only browser I have had enough. I was hoping that there would be an update soon to fix some of the problems with Beta 2 (speed, compatibility) but now that I know that it's going to be a few months yet I'm going back to Firefox. In my opinion you would be better off to release smaller incremental beta updates to satisify users like myself and keep them testing. Being stuck with month's old beta code is frusturating. After using Firefox again for the last few days, my only comment is make sure IE8 is at least as fast as Firefox 3. The increased responsiveness and page-rendering speed of Firefox over IE 8 Beta 2 has been a breath of fresh air. I miss the IE UI though, which I consider to be better than Firefox's more traditional UI. I'll come back and use (i.e. test) the next release when it's available.
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Thanks Eric, good to hear that you know about the .nz issues :)
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
@KeithH: Right click on the command bar area and uncheck "Lock the Toolbars", and then drag the command bar up to the favorites bar. I recommend locking the toolbars again after you do that. I do exactly that for exactly the reasons you mentioned :).
Anonymous
November 24, 2008
Tab opening time is slow no matter what, several hundred ms on absolutely clean XP system. I suspect this is architecture bug, and very hard to fix, but please, have a look into it. No program is usable when it has such big responsibility problems.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
There's only one feature that interests me. I'd like to be able to open links in the same window and tab regardless of the target attribute. Currently we have the option of choosing to open in a new tab or window (from the settings) but i can already control this by holding ctrl or shift respectively whilst clicking (or by right clicking and choosing the appropriate option). If i knew that clicking on a link would open in the same window all the time then this would save me loads of hastle. Currently if i know a site is linking to an outside site i open the site in a new tab and then close the current tab to avoid any inconsistencies and confusion. Obviously this method is far from ideal and i lose all my history.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
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Anonymous
November 25, 2008
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Anonymous
November 25, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] There is definately something messed up, because it works fine in all other browsers. More importantly, the "generated" bit is really just Apache rules that do mod rewrites to point to GIF images. Since I can load the image one second, but not the next, and vica versa IE is just getting confused somewhere. If I can setup a log that shows this I will send.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
@Jesse, if your server is returning HTTP/500 error messages, it's not IE getting confused, it's the server.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
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Anonymous
November 25, 2008
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Anonymous
November 25, 2008
The term is RTM (Release To Market) not RTW. Alpha - Beta - RC - RTM In IE8's case, thus far we only know... Beta1, Beta2, RC1, ???, RTM
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
@harold: At Microsoft and some other companies, the acronym "RTW" means "Release to Web". RTM (or "Release to Manufacturing") is usually used to refer to "traditional" products that ship on CD or DVD. The terms are often used interchangeably by development teams.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
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Anonymous
November 25, 2008
I found that having the Java add-on enabled caused very slow new tab creation, over a second. Disabling the Java add-on has made new tab creation almost instantaneous. This was with Java 6 Update 10...
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
Could you have a look on your implementation for :hover. This seems to be very slow if used for non-link elements on complex pages. This really hurts us and we need to find dirty workarounds to fix this issue.
Anonymous
November 25, 2008
A small suggestion to make to Favorites bar more awesome. When I click on the 'Add to Favorites Bar' button on for example: http://www.flickr.com/ I get an entry on the bar called 'Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing'. It would be much nicer to not have an overflowing text and simply 'Flickr'. So why not let the website address be the default title for a new favourite entry instead of some long discriptive title from a webpage. All these long entries clutter the favourites bar.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
I am really curious about the next releases and especially their standard complience. I appreciate it very much that you keep an eye on all the usability issues. Hopefully your work to review all the comments and suggestions will fructify. Good luck! And thanks for keeping us informed!
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
After installing Beta 2, it is not possible to see the headed one of the Outlook Express messages in the not-main identities.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
@abc : the long name of the favorite is the name of the current page. IE can't guess a name, so it takes the one in the title tag.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
After installing Beta 2, it is not possible to see the headed one of the Outlook Express messages in the not-main identities.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
How do you adjust IE8 so the "What's new in IE8" tab doesn't appear each time you open the browser? I only expected to see that screen the first time and now it comes up every time I open IE8.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
@JG: What's the URL of the page you see? What are your homepages set to in Tools / Internet Options? @abc: You can rename items on your Favorites bar by right-clicking them. The problem with just using the domain name is that it may not be specific enough (e.g. "Yahoo" would include their mail page, their groups page, their search page, etc, etc.)
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
@EricLaw: That is indeed a valid point. Maybe for the next version you could develop a smart algorithm to come up with a short and useful name for default? The default favourites title should be right more of the time (now almost every added favourite needs renaming).
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
Please allow the simple opacity:nn CSS style, otherwise your browser will appear to be broken. This is just a matter of your future browser understanding a soon-to-be CSS property that is sure to be implemented soon, and that has been essential to modern web development for many years now. So what if it doesn't validate for CSS 2, but only for CSS 3? You should allow it anyway, and let web designers decide for themselves what standard, if any, if it even matters, they want to validate to. The important thing is that we can make web pages that work to current or future standards, who cares about stupid semantic rules anyway?
Anonymous
November 26, 2008

Review your tests. Usually we do prepare tests for important functionality but we leave the details to be tested later. Make a list of all your features and test them.
Because your product is quite big, do an Release Candidate and collect information from your "real world" testers.
Prepare for the next steps. While developers and engineers test each other software and finish, you should plan for "the after". 3.1. Is the product gonna require frequent updates? 3.2. What parts did you left out for a 8.1 version? 3.3. Prepare to analyze market impact of your new product and their competitors. Did you do a great job? As far as I've seen and using the history of IE6 and IE7, I don't know if your product is gonna be good for the web industry or just another weight to carry. Think that people will have to "change" and when you do have to change from one browser to another, some people will ask themselves if IE8 is the alternative or perhaps other browser is. So take all the information you can from the RC, because your team will make: or thousands of developers happy, or just confirm what IE6 and IE7 were.

Anonymous
November 26, 2008
On my office PC I have windows XP installed. I have the IE 8 Beta 2, Firefox 3.0.4, Chrome installed. I am able to use Windows Live Mesh in the other two browsers. But, in IE I am not able to sign into the Live Mesh. The Connection settings are same for all the browsers.
Anonymous
November 26, 2008
My apologies in advance if these things have been mentioned.

I found IE8 beta 2 to be largely unusable. There were so many pages that didn't work that I switched compatibility mode on permanently, to be able to use IE8 on a day-to-day basis. In essence I gave up on IE8 beta 2 and now run it in compatibility mode. The rest of this information is with IE8 running in compatibility mode.
As the creator and maintainer of the Australian English dictionary files used by hundreds of thousands of people, I'd really like the ability to have spellcheck without having to install IE7Pro. IE7Pro adds many features I don't need and I find it is cumbersome for people to set up. The IE7Pro download manager has been a cause of problems for a number of people who have contacted me. A simple spellcheck add-on would be preferred, or for the feature to be built-in. I personally wouldn't recommend a browser that can't spellcheck with all the online work we do now.
I found the customer search engine facility from Google causes an infinite loop in IE8. I receive a pop-up blocked message and allowing pop-ups then causes the loop. This works fine in all other browsers. You can use the site http://www.justlocal.com.au/search.html to do a search and check what happens.
I just went to print the following PDF (http://www.webcentral.com.au/guides/managedexchange/pcandwebaccess_instructions.pdf). The dialogue was malformed and thus didn't work. I had to resort to using Firefox to print the PDF. The printer was an Epson C1100.
Would prefer new tab with nothing in it.
I find the speed lower than desired.
I have no need for a download manager and find the built-in features to be sufficient for my needs. This isn't to go against what others want, just to let you know it isn't important to me. It does appear important to others. I hope the feedback helps.

Anonymous
November 26, 2008
Неужели это будет настольки хороший браузер? не верю! Насколько это реально?
Anonymous
November 27, 2008
@Kelvin Eldridge: In Tools->Options' general tab, go to tab settings. Under "When a new tab is opened, open:" select "A Blank Page". Then new tabs will open blank. You can also set your homepage to about:blank if you like.
Anonymous
November 27, 2008
Ens, thanks for your help. I was looking for a way to make that work. I found it today! Thanks!
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
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Anonymous
November 28, 2008
If I overlay a sem-transparent div over (e.g. lightbox) over my page, I shouldn't be able to select the text underneath it (since the div blocks my clicks to the content below). This BREAKS in IE8 due to the Activities feature. I can now select any content that is under a semi-transparent div to then copy/paste/print or do whatever with. Since IE does not yet support the user-select CSS property (or have their own -ms- implementation) just how does one now deal with this regression issue? Or will this be fixed in IE8 RC?
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
PS The above is in ADDITION to the opacity/z-index regression bug in IE8 Beta 2.
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
Is it possible to set IE8 to render ALL sites in IE7 mode for now? How would I do this?
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
@cwilso / @EricLaw / @anyone at MSFT: Can I get confirmation that MS is aware of, and looking into the z-index bug with: -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsft.Alpha(Opacity=25)"; I really don't want to have to submit a test case and file a bug in IE Connect if this has already been fixed. thanks, steve_web
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
@321: On the Tools menu, click the "Compatibility View settings" option. @steve_web: I've seen various bugs related to the opacity filter and the Z-Index. It would of course be helpful to see your repro case to ensure that the issue you're seeing is the same one we know of. @Kelvin: Issue #3 does not repro in current builds. Please check back for the RC build when it's available. For issue #4, was the dialog an IE dialog or an Acrobat Reader dialog? Either way, it would be helpful to know specifically which dialog it was. @Jagannath: What specifically happens when you attempt to log into the Live Mesh?
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
@Ens: Thank you for the tip with new tab. @EricLaw: Will check RC build when available for issue #3. Thanks for confirming it is probably no longer an issue. For issue #4 if I open the PDF from my Desktop using Acrobat reader and click on the printer icon the dialog opens fine. If I open the document in IE8 using http://www.webcentral.com.au/guides/managedexchange/pcandwebaccess_instructions.pdf and then click on the Acrobat Reader printer icon within IE8 the dialog which displays isn't correct. The following is what the dialog looks like. (www.JustLocal.com.au/temp/ie8pdfissue.png) I hope that helps.
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
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Anonymous
November 28, 2008
@EricLaw(MSFT) In IE the progress bar goes on forever but I never the login page. But, for the other browsers, I get the login page immediately. At home, I don't have any problems with Live Mesh on IE.
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
Agreed I really hope the IE team has better things to do than make the browser pretty when you shrink it to a tiny-weeny size.
Anonymous
November 28, 2008
I saw as you said that #1 IE takes much longer to start up, even with Superfetch in Vista. #2 Open a new, empty tab. Again: much slower. #3-#99 Left out.
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
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Anonymous
November 29, 2008
I have found a problem regarding the tab-grouping feature in IE8. Let say I have 2 tab groups, A and B in yellow and blue colour respectively. If I close one tab in B group, B group will disappear, but when I open another tab from the page, the colour of B group sometimes is same as the A group (yellow). This problem not occur everytime because when I reproduce the step, B group will become another colour.Should't the colour of each tab group is different?
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
Is this a wishlist? I will switch back to IE if a free adblock plugin is available. Thanks in advance! :-)
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] I've filed a new bug in Connect for the z-index issue: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=384928 It is actually a smaller bug than in the title, only affecting certain elements (TABLE is the only one I have tested thus far) A test case is attached. Thanks, steve_web
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
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Anonymous
November 29, 2008
how do i completely uninstall internet explorer. I love firefox only, and i dont want to see any traces of internet explorer. Any help available?
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
how do i completely uninstall internet explorer. I love firefox only, and i dont want to see any traces of internet explorer. I have googled this problem but no luck and I thought guys who made it may help me. Any help available?
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
How are you guys going to receive data on which websites aren't rendering correctly in IE8? Are you exclusively taking reports from the Report a Webpage Problem? I thought it would be nice if you guys would do that, and then also, for those who opt in to a Customer Experience Improvement Program also send the sites when you click the button to go into compatibility view. It would be a lot easier, and would give you more feedback. :) You probably would run the risk of false positives when people go into compatibility sometimes when it's not needed. However, big trouble sites would probably bubble up over time. Just a suggestion! I can't wait for the next beta. At this stage, I'm hoping for more perf improvements and some other tweaks to IE8's rendering engine so I won't have to go into compatibility view as much. One bug I would love to be fixed is on a forum I go to that uses vBulletin, avatars and some other data does not show up on the left side. URL: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=340789 Look at the site with/without compatibility view and you will see a difference (at least in B2).
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
@Stefan Free plugin IE7pro also contains adblock capabilities.
Anonymous
November 29, 2008
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Anonymous
November 30, 2008
Are there any plans to bring back the inline AutoComplete for the AddressBar? Instead of improving it in next version, it has completely been removed(replaced). Selecting an address from the suggestions listed in the drop down list requires many more key presses than the previous behavior.
Anonymous
November 30, 2008
I'll add my vote for SVG support (even though it obviously won't be there for IE8). It's downright insulting that the IE team still hasn't officially stated its position on the matter, despite the fact thousands of people have been asking for it for years. So, some people are worried about "bloat", heh? Then feel free to take out VML, glowing fonts, and all other worthless proprietary stuff. It's not like developers use them anyway.
Anonymous
November 30, 2008
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Anonymous
November 30, 2008
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Anonymous
November 30, 2008
@steve_web Can you visit connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=381071 Regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 30, 2008
The slow loading of new tabs in Vista seems to be related to Protected Mode. I've an XP machine that runs IE8 with the same add-ons and it opens tabs almost instantly, whereas on Vista, it took 2 to 3 seconds. However, if I turn off IE8's protected mode, the tabs open instantly. Is there something in Protected Mode that slowed the loading of add-ons?
Anonymous
November 30, 2008
@Gerard, thanks I'll look into your test cases, and refine one of my own (and upload/send you a link).
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
We'd like to know the date of the release candidate (if known)for our development testing. It looks like first quarter or possibly early second Q? but do you have a date yet?
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@mhinkle: As noted in the above blog post, the Release Candidate will come out in 1Q 2009. The exact date has not yet been set. @lenard: You can enter Private Browsing in many different ways (most of which are available in Beta-2, I believe): 1> CTRL+SHIFT+P, 2> Tools Menu > InPrivate Browsing, 3> Safety toolbar button > InPrivate Browsing, 4> Tools toolbar button > InPrivate Browsing, 5> Start > Run > iexplore.exe -private As for the slowness in starting new tabs, can you please run IE with add-ons disabled (www.enhanceie.com/ie/troubleshoot.asp) and verify you still see the problem? I've never seen the new tab page take more than 500 ms with addons disabled. Note that you could alternatively type the address in the ~current~ tab or search bar, then hit ALT+ENTER to open the new page in a new tab.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
can someone direct me to the posting for bugs found.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
Whew finally got it to work. I must say Norton internet security does not like beta2 on my laptop. I tried 4 times lastnight to install but only to find that norton had shut down everything . I had to uninstall Norton Internet security 2007. Does anyone have info or a link where I can understand what happened. This did not happen on my home PC and I have the same Norton version on my PC as I have on my laptop
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
EricLaw - I've been using IE8B2 for quite a while and have been very happy with it. However, there is one troubling thing I've noticed about some of your comments. When people asked for a download manager and spell checking you stated that there were several good add-ons that accomplished both. However, every time people talk about an IE issue, you tell them to run with add-ons disabled. So, what is the position of the team, fill our gaps with add-ons or stop using add-ons? I realize you comment about disabling add-ons is to troubleshoot issues, but if people fill gaps with add-ons it sounds like they are destined to face perf issues eventually.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@Tim: Let me clarify that my suggestion is that users encountering problems try running without add-ons in order to ensure that add-ons are not the source of the problems. Very very often, add-ons are the source of problems. However, you seem to have jumped to the incorrect conclusion that this means that somehow ALL add-ons are bad. The reality is that there are many great add-ons available that are both stable and performant. My favorites are here: //www.enhanceie.com/ie/essentials.asp. I run with the Mouse Gestures add-on, for instance, and cannot imagine using a browser without it. In many cases, users who are encountering problems are running with unwanted add-ons that offer no real value (e.g. CD burning plugins), or running older versions for which newer, more stable versions are available. If they remove the unwanted add-ons, they find that they have a faster, more stable browser. Note that this isn't unique to IE or even browsers in general: You can download all sorts of utilities to your system (Windows, Mac, Unix, etc) that can either be really useful, or a source of nearly endless misery.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
I'm always amazed at reading just the pure hatred of web developers towards IE on this blog. I'd be interested to see how so many of the "experts" on here would handle the problems that the IE team face in making a forward progressing browser, while still supporting countless, poorly written custom web applications for corporations all over the world. Some people seem to forget that the flexability of IE has been abused by self proclaimed "web programmers" (and still is if you were to see the application that a vendor is trying to push onto us now). The IE Team is in a lose-lose battle on all fronts, but they are working hard to move the web forward all while not bringing internal corporate applications to a halt. Not bad if you ask me... ... now, while they just didn't make IE6 a separate download, I'll never know... (I know there was technology claims, but I'm sure it could have been made to work somehow)
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@HB : Just try to code a Web 2.0 application or anything more complicated than HTML4 and you will see why people hate IE so much. As many people have pointed out (including yourself), the best solution would be to create a standalone version of IE for all the intranets and bank websites that will just not update, and then either create a new standards compliant renderer, or use an existing one. It would actually be better security-wise too. Trying to incorporate the needs of ancient intranets and new websites seems to be causing a lot more problems than it is solving. At the end of the day, nobody will be happy. Corporate users will stick to IE6 like their business depends on it and anyone wanting a modern web browser will go for any of the other alternatives. Web developers will be even more unhappy as each version of IE introduces new incompatibilities. We just do not have this with a new release of Firefox or Safari.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
EricLaw - I wasn't trying to conclude that all add-ons are bad. In fact, I would agree that add-ons are an essential part of a healthy web browser. I was merely trying to make the point that as you depend on more and more add-ons, your browsing performance may begin to decline. In particular, using add-ons to fill core/frequently used browser capabilities make this issue spring to light even sooner. In addition, you cite that some add-ons offer no real value. While the ability to Manage Add-ons has gotten easier, I'd argue that your average user (say, my Father-in-law) hasn't really been helped since they don't understand the impact of add-ons let alone know how to find the dialog.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
Wow that did speed things up dramatically. It still takes a second or two but it is much faster. Ok so as Tim said what now? There's no way that I'm going to run a browser without addons, so where can I tweak the performance? If the issue is directly related to certain extensions, has MSFT contacted the developers to get them to tweak their code? AFAIK if I open a tab to about:blank or about:tabs I shouldn't be loading up anything other than the tiniest of hooks for extensions. There is no DOM to deal with etc. I'd be curious to see a list of performance for each of the top 20 extensions.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@billybob I understand that IE6 doesn't represent the web in it's current state. I've written plenty of applications that have had a feature or two dropped because of backwards compatibility. Thus why I brought up, and still think, a stand-alone IE6 browser would be in the best interests of the web. Microsoft has many talented, professional developers that could make that happen. I think they've done well to take IE as far as it's gone, but I don't think they can win this battle. If they had the chance to start from scratch, they could develop something incredible. The phrase 'IE' musters up too much nerd rage. It's time, IMO, to move on and start from scratch.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] It does not make difference if new tab page is about:blank. I narrowed down slowdown to Sun Java BHO. It makes noticeable difference when enabled (although absolutely clean system is still slow for me). Is it possible for IE to check which BHO is affecting performance? Like, record initialization / event catch time and mark add-on as 'slow'. It won't help me, but can help in bad performance situations, like Google Chrome does.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
"I'm always amazed at reading just the pure hatred of web developers towards IE on this blog." yet.... "I understand that IE6 doesn't represent the web in it's current state.... If they had the chance to start from scratch, they could develop something incredible" So, you do understand why there is hatred. It costs us time, money and features, not to mention sheer frustration and annoyance. Yet - if they stopped trying to dominate the web (or whatever it is they are trying to do), they COULD write something which would make our lives easier and the web a better place. INSTEAD, internal politics trumps better web and more productive developers, and I think thats what people get angry about. Our time and money is directly sacrificed for theirs. Why would people not be angry? Especially after being told that we should add all manner of headers just to make our sites render, then being told "Actually don't bother". Then to be told, "we love the community, and really value you" followed by bugs being closed or just plain ignored. What about features that developers care about? Just look at any discussion (or lack of) about embedded fonts, the new headers, SVG or Canvas. Developers are normally told their opinion is wrong and feature X will go ahead as planned. I think we have come to the state where most developers do not think their opinion will even be heard so they just use this site to vent frustration at whatever IE bug they had to workaround today, rather than try to be productive.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
Hey guys, I dont know how all to put this, but I'm a beta tester for Win_Server_2008_Enterprise, and one of the biggest things that I find hard to cope with is IE in Server 08. I tried to go to any website, and its all blocked. I try to download something, and its all blocked, and it gets really annoying to the point that I almost gave up on using IE! XD But.. I think that you need to give the user more control over there security levels, especially just being able to turn everything off for a moment, and browse the internet freely, w/o having to worry or fret over IE being in your face! :) Thanks guys, and hope that this IE8 is gonna be way better than IE7. Keep up the good work! ;)
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@lenard, @Tihiy: You can see how long each add-on takes to start in the "Load Time" column of Manage Addons. While we've previously written about how to build faster add-ons (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/04/designing-for-add-on-performance.aspx) the unfortunate reality is that many ISVs don't follow best-practices. Microsoft has been in touch with the makers of popular add-ons about their performance, but certainly there's nothing stopping users from contacting add-on vendors to request that they make faster versions. (When Microsoft says "Hey, ISV, make a faster add-on" the ISV can just yawn and say "yeah, maybe later." When ~users~ contact the ISV and say "Hey, ISV, I'm uninstalling your add-on until you make a faster version" the ISV is more likely to listen.) @StarBase Computer Tech: If you're using Win2k8 as a workstation, then you'll probably want to disable the "Enhanced Security Configuration" feature that is the source of the prompts you see (normally, we don't advise browsing on Servers, but you're just using a server OS as a workstation). You can disable the ESC feature on the Win2k8 Server Configuration Manager dialog.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] - you are right, users moaning is much more effective than a gentle corporate request. Thus; Dear Microsoft; Based on the (incomplete) load time column for Add-ons in IE8 it has become painfully obvious that the addon that is ruining my performance the most is "Microsoft Research" - I personally have no idea what this addon does (AFAIK) I have never used it. Since it is created by the same MFGR that creates the browser it lives in, and is installed by default, I think that it would be highly advantageous for MSFT to either (a) disable/uninstall this addon, and or fix the performance of it so that it loads at least 10x faster. EricLaw [MSFT] on the IE Blog posted a link to help you fix any performance issues with your addon. Please follow this link for information. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/04/designing-for-add-on-performance.aspx Thank you Concerned User
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
@SoftEngi: We are implementing some address bar improvements which will decrease the time it takes to select a URL. Stay tuned for the RC release to see these changes.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
Microsoft research add on is a MS Office add-on. When activated you get a references pane for looking up information. Fairly useless. It would be relavant to know which Office versions you use to determine which version of that reasearc addon software causes the slow opening of the new tabs.
Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 01, 2008
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Anonymous
December 02, 2008
@hAl: I have 3 WinXP boxes. 2 running IE7, 1 running IE8 Beta2. On the 2 running IE7, it is Office 2003, on the 1 running IE8, it is Office 2007. In all 3 cases - disabling the Microsoft Research Toolbar caused a massive performance gain when opening new tabs. I would HIGHLY recommend to ANYONE running IE to immediately, without hesitation, disable this addon. If someone can tell me what "good" purpose it serves - then great. Otherwise this is just pure Bloatware [TM] and should be removed. PS Does anyone know if it can be uninstalled? (safely?). I'm fine if it just lives there disabled, but it would be much cleaner if I just removed it from my system.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
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Anonymous
December 02, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT]: Oh right, i was so dumb so i didn't scrolled right. Java adds a whopping 0.6 s to tab open time! Thank you for clarifying this.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
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Anonymous
December 02, 2008
reorganizing website in favorite bar and tab is just awkward. Can it slide automatically Just like the chrome tabs or Windows 7 reorganizing taskbar it's much smoother and easier that way.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
In Beta 2, you are unable to right click a favorite (in the undocked favorites menu) and delete the bookmark.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
@EricLaw [MSFT] / @Mitch74: I think the trick with the SVG bit, is that yes, any of us could write an extension, but none of us know if Microsoft does intend to write their own native one and if so by when. If Microsoft had a roadmap that indicated "yes, for IE9 MS plans to ship IE with native SVG support" there would be little point in writing our own plugin (the old Adobe one works fine, for now) What is frustrating is that we don't know when IE plans to natively support SVG, or if it will EVER support SVG natively. Which in turn holds developers back from using SVG because a lot of their end users might not have it. I dream of the day that I visit the IE Blog and the post topic is: The ROADMAP for release [X] of Internet Explorer. That would be the day that developers would be sooooooooooooooooooooo happy. Because then, and only then, would we have any clue as to Microsoft's direction with IE.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
We know IE8 doesn't have SVG. If the IE team stays on their stated roadmap of a new IE version every 18-24 months, that means that the earliest that IE would support SVG is Q1 2011, which isn't exactly right around the corner. Even if IE9 does include SVG, it will be ~2012 before it has >50% marketshare, if history is any guide. I think the amusing thing here is that if you look closely at the other browsers' built-in SVG support, it's actually not very good (http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php). SVG is an incredibly complicated spec, which some of the fanboys here conveniently ignore when they imply that adding SVG would be "easy" or suggest that Microsoft is just "lazy." I think the interesting question in all of this mess is why Adobe is pulling support for their SVG add-on. THAT is a far more interesting move than the fact that IE still doesn't support it.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
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Anonymous
December 02, 2008
@Stephen - thats an awesome chart and breakdown much appreciated! For me my SVGs are fairly basic... vectors, fills, text, and links... the animation stuff is cool, but I don't need it - Thus the current Firefox/Safari support is plenty. The Elephant is my biggest concern. Its too bad the Adobe plugin wasn't open source, that would be a great project to jump on in the absence of native IE support.
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
Any chance to get dynamic vml creation support back? This is a major backward compatibility issue, isn't it ?
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
Irbabe - I and others have been poking MS folks about the fact that, if they're not gonna support SVG, they could at least bug fix VML. I'll be watching for this in the IE8 RC due in Q1. In addition to not being able to dynamic creation of VML elements (in IE8 "strict standards" mode), there were other bugs that actually got introduced in VML support for IE7. It'd sure be nice to get those fixed as well. Eric, if you or other MS folks need specifics about these bugs, I can go dig them up. Unfortunately, I no longer have 'write' access to the Connect database since it got locked down to 'beta testers' or whatever. Cheers,

Bill

Anonymous
December 02, 2008
Obviously the final release for IE8 will still have some issues outstanding - many will indeed be discovered after release. What I'd really love to see, in addition to MS fixing the security bugs that are discovered, they also fix rendering bugs with any weekly updates. The number of outstanding rendering bugs for IE7 is colossal (172 listed on http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs), so PLEASE Microsoft don't make us wait until yet another version is written before any IE8 rendering bugs are addressed!
Anonymous
December 02, 2008
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Anonymous
December 03, 2008
Dave: rendering bug fixes in weekly updates would be a bad thing, IMO. No other browser vendor does that, either. It'd be bad because not all users update their system, and you'd then have a wide variety of IE8. It'd be nearly impossible to serve them all working pages... IE6 and 7 are quite buggy, indeed, but at least they're all the same everywhere, and you know how they behave.
Anonymous
December 03, 2008
@Dave Why would anyone look at IE7 rendering issues fir the IE8 betas ? Most of those are already solved in IE8.
Anonymous
December 03, 2008
@hAl re:"Most are already solved in IE8" You must have a special version of IE8Beta2 that we don't have. The version I have is still very beta and is no where near ready for release based on lack of fixed for old IE6/IE7 issues as well as IE8 regressions) I don't care how long IE8 takes to ship, I just hope that the Q1 - 2009 RC1 is considerably fixed up in terms of rendering, JS bug fixes, and UI improvments/fixes. If the RC1 is only mildly better than Beta 2 then we are in for lots of trouble. We have a status for our clients regarding supported browsers and their stability. Currently IE8Beta2 is reading 61% stable and has a 3% recommendation for users to upgrade. We will be updating when the RC1 comes out but until the "recommended" flag hits 85%, none of our users will be upgrading. we might update before the release if information about fixes to Beta2 are released before the RC.
Anonymous
December 05, 2008
The next public update of Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users
Anonymous
January 10, 2009
Paul Cutsinger,Principal Lead Program Manager has posted about IE8 in Windows 7 Beta in the IE Team's
Anonymous
January 14, 2009
Back in October , Sunava described changes that we made to the XDomainRequest (XDR) object in IE8 between
Anonymous
January 15, 2009
Durante la presentazione che feci ai MS Days 08 su IE8, ho brevemente accennato ad alcune API che possono
Anonymous
February 06, 2009
A few weeks back, we announced Compatibility View improvements available in the Release Candidate build

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IE8: What’s After Beta 2

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