Why Internet Explorer 8 still Sucks Balls

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Written by Pavs on March 6th, 2008

In it’s own words Microsoft promotes IE8 for “professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.“, because of it’s built in tools for debugging purpose. ReadWriteWeb has done a great job promoting IE8, this is what they had to say regarding it’s standard compliance:

There were hints that IE8 would be a remarkable offering on the IE Blog as they released tidbits about the browser’s capabilities. For example, the announcement of IE8’s passing of the Acid2 test (a test for standards compliance) marked a milestone in IE8’s development. The standards mode was originally going to be turned off by default letting web developers code for it by including a “meta” tag to make use of IE8’s new standards compliant mode. Later, Microsoft came to their senses and made the default the standards-compliant mode.

That’s great news. It seems Microsoft has finally done something right, regarding IE, by following web standards; which has been a cause of headache for many web developers and freelancers like me trying to get websites compatible for two different browsers.

Let’s look at some IE8 standard compliance power:

Readwriteweb.com under IE8:

Readwriteweb.com under Firefox: (the way it was supposed to load)

I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website:

All off this are reproducible by IE8. Try it at your own risk.

I am sure IE8 has some good new interesting features, but I was busy trying to find problems with it. And you have to admit this was way too easy. Next time I will I will try to point the new features, some of which are quite interesting.

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5 Responses to “Why Internet Explorer 8 still Sucks Balls”

1
cop1152
March 6th, 2008 14:51

also MAKES you install the malicious software removal tool…WTF
2
tim
March 7th, 2008 01:06

Are these both served up exactly the same, e.g., from local files? Many websites serve special HTML to IE clients because they know IE won’t render it right.

I suspect your websites might be serving up intentionally broken HTML because it thinks it has to render OK in IE7, so you’re not actually looking at IE8’s compliance: you’re really just looking at the IE7-IE8 diff, so seeing lots of crap here is a *good* thing. It means IE8 isn’t broken like IE6/IE7 are.
3
hoopskier
March 7th, 2008 18:02

In case you missed it, this is *beta 1*, and the IE blog has stated that full CSS 2.1 compliance is the goal for the *final* product. They’ve never made any claims that the current beta is compliant, or even any more compliant than IE7 was. It simply shows the directions that they are going.

There’s a great video on channel9.msdn.com with Chris Wilson, where he states that the entire layout engine is brand new. I’d say that what they released this week, having been writtten in the timeframe since IE7 was released, shows tremendous progress. I wonder how long it would take the Firefox or Opera folks to rewrite a CSS 2.1-compliant layout engine from scratch?
4
WL
March 22nd, 2008 07:02

I just recently installed IE8 and immediately noticed layout problems as well. It seems to have problems clearing floats, and different types of positioning, makes me wonder how it passed the Acid2 test, hopefully its as hoopskier suggested, that some sites are serving up broken pages to IE8?
5
thenonhacker
March 27th, 2008 07:43

So now do we want IE8 Team to revert their decision to “Go Strict Standards First”?

OH RIGHT, we not COMPLAIN about BROKEN PAGES and then accuse IE8.

THINK, THINK, MY FRIEND!!!

Your pages are broken simply because they contain non-standard stuff we used to put into to make them compliant with different browsers.

When IE8 Team made the 2nd decision, the Idealists at WaSP rejoiced. BUT OH NO, the Pragmatists at WindowHaxor.NET frowned.

Now we have DOUBLE STANDARDS to deal with!

So which one is it going to be?

Decision 1: IE8 accomodate already-exisiting web page code, resulting in Happy amateur HTML/CSS coders?

- OR -

Decision 2: IE8 be a strict police and render pages as they should like Acid2?

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