IE8 : Beta, Not Better

So Microsoft launched its version 2 beta of IE8 last week. Internet Explorer has been under some reasonably close scrutiny over the last year or so (or do I notice it more because of the field I’m in?). So how does it stack up?

I’m still a little confused and, to be perfectly honest, somewhat worried by some of the developments we’re seeing out of Redmond right now. While IE8 looks marginally prettier and does more things, what I want to know is “what is the added value” and “who are you targetting with this product”?

First, let’s look at the Added Value part.

Features

Web Slices, Accelerators, InPrivate Browsing and Compatibility View. All designed to make your browsing easier, safer and more collaborative. I could write a pretty massive post about each of these features, but to start with I think I’ll briefly cover a couple and then add further detail in later posts.

Web slices are essentially the same as RSS feeds. They are sections within a web page (i.e. paragraphs, bulletins or generally blocks of content) that can be subscribed to which allow IE to automatically notify you whenever those sections are updated. As best I can tell, there are none of the inner workings of an RSS feed – it seems that IE will physically run off and check this list of content that you want notifications about. But the premise is the same.

I can’t decide whether I like this feature or not. As a web user, I like the idea of being told whenever something new has appeared on a favourite site. However as a web developer (and I’m leaning more strongly towards this view) I do not want to add in extra HTML and CSS content in order to provide this feature. Check this site for a more detailed coverage of the inner workings of Web Slices.

Accelerators are possibly best thought of as smart tags for the web. For those people who are familiar with Office 2003 / 2007 smart tags, the icon that appears over common text blocks such as addresses, locations, search terms or other selected content. Once selected, this content can be searched with Live Search, blogged with Live Spaces, emailed, mapped, translated and more.

InPrivate mode essentially locks down your browser so that no traceable information is stored on the local machine. Described by some as “Porn Mode” due to the complete absence of records of your browsing history, the actual intent is to provide a significantly enhanced security feature.

I have been at TechEd in Auckland this week and Steve Riley presented a session on privacy. If more users fully understood the implications of third party cookies, it might well be argued that the InPrivate browsing feature was long overdue. However, I would like to have seen a little more control or customisation around the feature so that I could pick and choose what type of cookie was kept and which ones were to be blocked. Perhaps some mechanism for classifying the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Target Market

So what market is being pitched at with this release? Well, clearly it’s the users; the development community had their shot in the last release, but while I think there are a lot of new features with a lot of potential, I still think that IE8 has a long way to go for the actual web development community it serves.

Some are arguing that rendering issues continue to plague the browser that now breaks every hack that ever had to be put into a website to cater to older versions of Internet Explorer. And to a certain degree, that’s true. However the bigger picture is that IE is now a mature platform upon which other applications can reliably be built. At some point, Microsoft inevitably had to take a clean slate approach and leave the ghost of IE6 behind. So while there might be some work to do by developers to tidy up these broken sites, the good news is there’s a more consistent playing field on which to work.

I’ll be adding more posts over the next few days highlighting some of the stand-out TechEd announcements that resonated with me.