If you haven't seen the news by now, here's your quick heads-up that IE8 is now officially released. The news was part of the Day 2 keynote here at MIX09, but it was largely expected (and even predicted on this blog). The official release wraps-up a much longer than expected development cycle for the follow-up browser to the headache-inducing IE7. In fact, it was exactly a year ago, at MIX08, where I originally blogged about IE8 beta 1, so it has taken a full year to go from Beta 1 to RTW! Regardless, the process is done now and IE8 is official.
If you've forgotten what's new in IE8, here's a quick overview of the major changes from IE7:
- Big performance improvements in JS processing, page rendering, chrome speed
- Many chrome changes (new address bar, Web Slices, Accelerators, etc.)
- Security improvements ("InPrivate" browsing mode)
- Big steps forward in standards support:
- "Most" CSS 2.1 compliant browser
- Beginning of HTML 5 implementation (XDR, local storage, etc.)
- Passes ACID2
- Compatibility mode for "headache-less" upgrades
2 comments:
Unfortunately, it's also the browser that is least compliant with the Acid3 test... 20/100 when Webkit is scoring close to 90/100 and Opera is claiming 100/100.
Obviously, some of that is MS's reluctance to implement ahead of the CSS3 standards, but a lot of it is not.
Whether or not this is significant for rendering is debatable, but the bad PR is going to cost MS.
@Anon- Not a bad point. IE8 is definitely not looking good in ACID3, but I'm not sure that matters...yet. You've got to admit that it's a huge step forward to have all major browsers pass ACID2 (FF3, Safari, Opera, IE8). Hopefully we'll have ACID3 support for the next round!
-Todd
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