August 28, 2008
IE8 Beta 2 hits the Internets, but do we really care?
Posted Aug. 28, ’08, 11:45 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Apple » Rivals
So I’m not really sure what all the hullabaloo is about. Yes, IE8 Beta 2 is out. No, I haven’t tried it — it’s only for Windows, as they discontinued the Mac version back in 2003 at version 5.2.3. Not that it’s any big loss: the Mac has plenty of great browsers. I’m a Firefox man myself, but Camino and Safari are perfectly respectable alternatives.
But when even the BBC calls you out on being behind the times, you know you’re in trouble:IE8’s inPrivate mode performs the same job as the Private Browsing mode available in Apple’s Safari Browser, and the Web Slices function echoes Safari’s Web Clips.
The “smart address bar” works much like the so-called “Awesome bar” in Mozilla’s latest release of its Firefox browser, and Firefox has long had the ability to reopen closed tabs.
Hell, The USA Today wasn’t too thrilled either: “I encountered some sluggishness testing Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista and XP computers. Microsoft says its new browser is faster than before, but it didn’t always feel that way.”
Ok, run along now.
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The reason this is news is not because IE8 will break any technological ground. It is because Windows defaults to (and is, in fact, grafted onto) IE. That means that almost all of the unthinking, unwashed masses - you know, the ones who made Windows the dominant operating system - use Internet Explorer.
If you're a web developer, unfortunately you'll have to care.
If your a web designer you will notice old IE6 rendering problems coming back and totaly new rendering problems to fix...
How come Firefox, Opera and Safari manage to render pages made to work on IE & WC3 compliant pages just fine. But IE never can....