Internet Explorer 8 – Good enough?

I’ve been a long time IE user. Well, we all have. Since the fall of Netscape, there was basically no need for another browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer did everything well and with the internet still being a small part of our daily lives, this wasn’t a problem.

But time’s change. And Mozilla, somehow, saw a change in the wind and began stealing marketshares with their Firefox browser. With FF 2.0, I eventually switched over. Compared to Firefox, IE7 was slow, resource inefficient and most importantly (for developers, that is), not standards compliant.

And after having lost over 30% of the browser market, Microsoft is now putting everything on the line in order to maintain their dominant position. Internet Explorer 8 is what they’ve come up with, which came out in a second public beta about two months ago. And it’s a fine update, indeed.

Evolved address and search bars
Mozilla introduced a fine update to the address bar in Firefox 3, and Microsoft has done the same for IE8. It doesn’t just show your recently visited websites, it searches through your favourites, recent searches, feeds, and search suggestions. The search bar still works as before, but is now customizable by developers (search engine managers, like Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Ebay), so that it can display more than just “simple” textbased search results:

Security near perfection
From a security standpoint (as seen today), IE6 was a mess. The seventh version took this to higher level, but IE8 is pushing it near perfection. Internet Explorer 8 will introduce things like the SmartScreen filter, cross-site scripting (XSS) filter, enhanced Delete Browser History, domain name highlighting, and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) support.
If you don’t know what this means, that’s ok, but know that just from a security standpoint, IE8 is a lot better. These listed features will block website developers (read: hackers) from overloading buffers inside your computer, or executing code from another website on a website you are visiting.
This version also introduces the new private browsing feature called InPrivate. While surfing in this mode, IE will not store anything on the hard drive the websites after they’re finished loading. It won’t store which sites you’ve been on, either.

Standards compliance
When Microsoft had their major position, being standards compliant didn’t really mean much. The way Microsoft read and displayed the websites was how you had to write your pages. With Firefox (and Apple’s Safari desperatly trying to get a foothold on the PC side), developers will riot if Microsoft doesn’t develop the next IE version to be standards compliant, which IE8 has fulfilled. Of course, this has led a lot of websites to be rendered badly on IE8:

What’s going on here? Wouldn’t standards compliant mean that websites would act “normally” (i.e, all browsers will display websites correctly)? Well, yes, that’s true. The funny thing is of course that over the years, people have gotten used to writing IE-specific code so that the website is rendered in the right way on IE, and then sending other code to get it correctly rendered on other browsers.
The problem here is that while IE8 expects standards compliant code, it actually gets the “old-school IE code”, making a few websites look bad (and some, really horrible). I can’t actually update this blog on IE8, I had to do it on Firefox. This is of course something that will change overtime, and Microsoft will get things right with the “IE7 compliance mode”, meaning websites written specifically for IE7 will be rendered with the old IE7 engine, making them look the way they should. And, over time, websites will drop this IE-specific code and the internet will get standardized. Finally.

The searchbar, instead of a search dialog. Finally.

Performance
IE8 is fast. A lot faster than its predecessor, in fact. I don’t have any specific measurements in order to compare it with other browsers, but the difference is really so small that you wouldn’t notice it. IE8 has the speed neccessary for today’s browsing, and manages memory more efficiantly than before (something Firefox has hade huge problems with, by the way). With all its add-ons, it also eliminates the need for most IE add-ons.

Summary
This isn’t everything. IE8 manages tabs more elegantly (and even colors them, based on from which site you’ve opened them), it has some new developer features and looks, as always, pretty nice. With the performance and security features especially, there is nothing to keep you from upgrading to IE8. Really, when it does, even if you’re not using IE, you should update. If not to re-evaluate your current browser standpoint, to maintain security and performance for other applications that do use the IE engine (there are a lot of them out there, believe me). There will probably be even more new updates as IE8 gets closer to RTM. It will ship as part of Windows 7, but my sources tell me there will be a stand-alone version out there by next year. Time will tell.

All in all – Internet Explorer 8 (even in its current beta stage) is worth checking out. Whether it will manage to keep up with Firefox 3, the answer is clear – yes it will. Whether it will actually be better, I don’t know. My point is, however, Microsoft is back, with a competitor worthy of Mozilla. Which one is actually the best, you’ll have to decide for yourselves.

You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

Marcus Näslund
tp640871@hotmail.com
2008-10-02