IE8 Beta - First Impressions
March 11th, 2008 by ReAn
Well let’s begin by pointing out, I’ve never been a huge advocate of Internet Explorer. I enjoy IE6’s extremely quick loading time and use it from time to time when a page just up and refuses to load in Opera (My current browser of choice) and aside from that, It’s wonderfull for embedding into your applications.
IE8 Advertized Features
- Three Web-Standards Mode Selector
The browser comes with three distinct display engines, IE8’s Standards Mode, IE7 Emulation or Strict Mode, and IE5’s basic support known as Quirks Mode. Each of these modes can be forced by a page with a meta tag embedded in the page’s content. The browser also comes with a button to allow the user to force IE7’s Emulation. The biggest question is: What do we gain? IE8 boasts higher compliance to globally accepted web-standards but when subjected to the Acid2 Test, the engine still fails to “smile.” The Acid3 test only gains a mere 5 points over IE7, and 12 points over IE6.
It’s possible that IE8 may hold tremendous power in comparison to it’s predecesors in many areas, but the Acid tests are proof that Microsoft isn’t heading in the direction they need to be to support web-standards as it claims to be doing.
- Activites
This feature is actually the only feature in IE8 that really impressed me overall. Activities allows you to pull down a context menu over a selected area of text, say you selected this text, a small arrow icon would appear to the top-right of your selection and allow you to pull down various “Activites” on it, Namely seach on Windows Live. Additionally you can load more activites into IE8 but it’s really not much more than a simple plugin engine written into text selection.
- WebSlices
On first look it was hard for me to determine what WebSlices were. After about 15 minutes of searching I learnt that they’re actually just a microsoft version of an RSS feed with a fancy custom display. Really, it’s site subscription with themed visuals. Nothing groundbreaking.
- Security Features
-
- Domain Highlighting
To be perfectly honest, when I first encountered this feature, I thought it was a display bug with coloring, really what it does is takes an url like:
http://www.cnn.a.com/news.php?id=12263
Which can look like a valid CNN site and shows it like this:
http://www.cnn.a.com/news.php?id=12263
-
- Enhanced protection from deceptive websites
Basically same deal as IE7, sends where you go for “Microsoft Approval”
Acid Tests
- Acid1
Result: PASS
Image: 
- Acid2
Result: FAIL
Image: 
- Acid3
Result: FAIL
Image: 
Notes
I found some interesting (not neccisarily good) things about IE8. Firstly, there’s this wonderfull dropdown menu on the right of the tab-bar called ‘Tools’ which basically is like a features hot-menu. It allows for most of the features of the browser to be enabled/disabled/tweaked. Interestingly enough there’s an option in it called “Windows Messenger” which will open up the Old Windows Messenger (MSN) that comes built into WindowsXP. Why would microsoft in thier newest browser endorse and support antiquated software?
Additionally I did the standard Stress Testing for memory and CPU footprint, I got some interesting results. Not only did I learn that IE8 fails miserably at memory managment, but I also learnt that IE8 opens up two instances of iexplore.exe for a single window. I cannot fathom why this is, but It’s the way it works, this also threw off my initial review of IE8’s memory footprint since one copy had significantly less memory usage than the other.
The test comprised of my usual test, open up 5 tabs and load IGN.com a specifically heavy-weight and content-rich website designed almost completely to crash your computer (well ok, probably not designed to do it, but danm it’s fat!).
iexplore.exe - 170,000 K
iexplore.exe - 2,500 KAlthough on the CPU side, it’s mirraculous!
iexplore.exe - 1% Cpu
iexplore.exe - 0% CpuThat’s definately an improvement over IE6 & IE7 and way less CPU than Firefox 2. Just need to work down that footprint.
General Performance & Responsiveness
Let’s just say I miss IE6 already, IE8 is slow like it’s brother IE7, pages load slower, the program is generally less responsive, and clunky. It seems like there’s a small CPU lag before you do anything really, menus have a slight delay, tabs take time to load up. This is definately no Opera or Firefox, so it generally does not impress me. I always fell back to IE6 for it’s speed, IE8 seems like a step backwards.
Conclusion
Alright, so to wrap up this slightly biased first-look review of IE8 Beta 1 (and yes, I know it’s still in beta) I’ll give it a 4/10, it had some nice fancy featues which are cool, but it still fails to deliver on IE’s major fallback points. It’s still offering poor compatability to known web-standards, and it’s security is junk, a “daddy, is this site ok” filter does not address IE’s major flaws in security.
Personally I think the entire IE engine needs to be re-written, with proper checks on imports / plugins / activex / scripting. Basically killing all custom scripting, and adding a “Cancel or Allow” button to everything is a very cheap way of providing “security” in fact, it’s more a way of providing “deniability” on Microsoft’s part, because the user has to click yes when they fail. You would think that after the failure of Vista to please the market and tonnes of angry reviews & jokes made at Vista’s “Cancel or Allow” that Microsoft might have learnt something.
Personally I’ll be reverting to IE6 until Microsoft can prove to me that the slower, and larger version of thier browser ACTUALLY is worth the upgrade.
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17 Responses to ' IE8 Beta - First Impressions '
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