The comment of the day for yesterday was from our post Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. Sarah Perez noted that IE8 “showcases many new features and improvements, like Facebook and eBay integration, standards compliance, and the ability to work with AJAX web pages.” Sarah wrote that “this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox’s creep into browser market share lightly.” However commenter theharmonyguy thinks that IE8 is as much a challenge to Google, because “some of the new features seem similar to things like gadgets in iGoogle.”
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Here is his comment:
“Good news: Passes Acid2 (translation: great CSS 2.1 support, including things like display:table), defaults to standards mode (both previously announced).
Bad news: Still no support for application/xhtml+xml, not even close on Acid3 (Opera 9.5 9755 passes 61), not good support for CSS3 selectors (granted that’s not officially a final spec, but Opera 9.5 9755 gets 100%).
I’m dubious about some of the new features… interesting how Microsoft seems to continually rely on tying together their spectrum of offerings. IE8 includes convenient shortcuts to other web sites for various info… and many of those sites just happen to be Microsoft sites. I don’t blame them for linking to their own services, but ironic that Microsoft is essentially “bundling” again.
Some of the new features seem similar to things like gadgets in iGoogle… this release is as much about Google as Firefox. Very happy to see that the WebSlices setup does not introduce proprietary tags and even uses the hAtom microformat.
I’m sure many users will find things like activites and WebSlices handy, but it still seems to me that Microsoft is way behind the curve on features innovation with web browsers. Many of these features have long been available via plug-ins. However, I’m glad to finally see features like session recovery.
All in all, this release is good news. It definitely demonstrates the IE team is serious about web standards now, and it signals we’ll be seeing IE updates more frequently. IE8 is still behind other browsers in many ways, but kudos to the IE team for the progress they’ve made – it’s going to help developers and users a bunch.”
