Finally Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 has been released into the wild and of course I had to install it right away and try it out, and these are my first impressions.
Installation
The installation went smooth and just a reboot on a Windows Vista Ultimate machine.
Speed
This is by far the best experience so far. It starts really fast, it opens a new tab/windows faster and it renders the pages even faster. What will happen when they start optimizing it! After some testing I find it even faster than the Firefox version I’m using. Thank you!
Standards
As expected, not everything looks that nice or work when using Internet Explorer 8 in it’s super standards mode. If you need to access some site that does not work with IE8 just hit the IE7 emulation mode button and restart the browser and you are all set! This site, has some layout problems which I will fix soon.
User interface
The user interface is almost similar to Internet Explorer 7, but have some minor changes.
Toolbar
The toolbars is surrounded with more space, which I personally think is annoying. I would like to have it as small as possible. The Favorites center lost the icons, why? to save space? I would have preferred to use icons only instead!?
Address field
The address field highlights the domain with a more black font color. Look at the image to the right, where you can see that wictorwilen.se is highlighted.
The auto-complete feature when writing URL’s are smarter, it now puts the most used file first if there are several matches (at least this is what it feels like, anyone who knows exactly how it behaves). When working with application such as SharePoint that uses underscore in a lot of pages or folders they previously was sorted first.
Internet Explorer 8
Internet Explorer 7
RSS Feeds
The RSS feeds renders so much faster and Microsoft has finally gotten rid of the annoying memory leaks when browsing multiple feeds that I previously have blogged about (here and here). It is submitted to the Microsoft Support but they have closed the bug as a Won’t fix, but now I don’t care anymore :-)
Developer Tools
Yes! IE8 now includes great developer tools; HTML, DOM and CSS anlayzer and a built-in script debugger.
SharePoint and IE8
I had some fears that SharePoint sites would not look nice or work with IE8, but it’s the total opposite situation. SharePoint sites are rendering faster, looks just like before and I have not yet experienced anything unusual. The script engine is so much better, than it’s predecessors, in IE8.
And what about the bugs?
Yes, I have found some already. For example selecting text is not easy. Scrolling with the mouse wheel does not work properly. I had it crash once, but the new crash recovery mechanism worked smoothly.
This is just a handful of the brand new Internet Explorer 8. I guess that Firefox, Safari and the rest will have some major competition in the future!