IE8 has been in RC1 stage for some time now, and, as always, I had to check it out ASAP when I was notified. I had high hopes for it, reading the development blogs as the time went by waiting for it, and I had hopes that it would be much better then it’s predecessors. One thing that cought my eye in early 2008 was that IE8 actually passed the Acid2 test, which is a HUGE step forward for IE. (Just try the Acid test in IE7, which is worse, then even IE6 on the same test.)
After reading that I was very hopeful that IE8 would be ‘a gigant leap for humanity’ regarding how we can build webpages, but I was sadly disappointed. At least Microsoft themselves are trying to point out the differences between their version, what they will support and what they wont, however the reading on MSDN is not encouraging. You can read for yourself, but glaring omissions from what I had hoped was going to be included from CSS3 specifications would be first-letter, first-line, nth-last-child(), border-radius, box-shadow, selection and repeat-item, among others.
Sure IE8 has taken gigant leap forwards in some regards, but left a lot to be wished for to be built into the engine. What does this mean for us developers? Well, we can’t do cutting edge technologies where an almost pixel perfect layout is needed crossbrowser/OS, but we have to in some cases probably find new hacks that are IE specific to their nature, but will serve the FireFox/Opera/Safari population without much problems, if any at all.
Since large corporations all around the world is still using, and in some cases even DEPLOYING, and maintaining IE6 still, and the complete flop with IE8 installing on Vista, resetting all plugins so they had to be re-downloaded/re-installed, I don’t see them switching anytime soon due to the cost of hours to implement, as well as the cost for lost productivity.
On another note, Safari 4 is out, and I will give my view of that one shortly, I need to test it more intensively, but the claim of baing the fastest browser for Mac/PC may hold true, it’s looking to be a contender for Opera in that regard
