06 Mar

IE8 Beta 1

…is now available to download and test.

According to the blog entry, IE8 is going to be very exciting for web developers. We can finally start ditching the old hacks built for IE7 and other lesser browsers.

It is not mentioned in that post, but IE8 will render in web standards mode by default. This means that IE8 will read your CSS and display it using as close as possible a rendering model based on W3C rules. This is in contrast to IE7 and below, where the standard was to display in “quirks” mode (using the MS version of the CSS model) and you had to jump through hoops to make it use standards mode.

IE8 aims to have full CSS 2.1 support. This is fantastic, as up to this point, there has been a great specification available, but designers could not use it to its full potential because IE simply wasn’t good enough for it. Microsoft is aiming to fix this deficiency …finally!

Some HTML5 elements will be available. I have not yet seen the list, but this again is a great new trick. HTML5 allows a designer to do some pretty funky things like this: <input name="email" type="email" required="required" />. That is something which at present would require a lot of supporting JavaScript.

I’m looking forward to this. It’s about time that IE grew up and joined the adult browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

3 thoughts on “IE8 Beta 1

  1. kae, have you noticed all the rendering issues with it though lol some msdn posts suggest that its just because its in beta but you don’t see firefox rendering almost completely differently between betas! ff3beta4 is actually quite good šŸ˜€

  2. I haven’t dug into its CSS capabilities, but I /hear/ that it’s much better at it than IE7. Perhaps the problems are that people expect IE to use their crap proprietary “standards”, and when IE8 tries to render that kind of CSS, it shows. IE8 by default is in “standards mode”. I expect a /huge/ number of breakages while designers “fix” their designs to use proper CSS instead of the broken IE7 and lesser versions.

    On a related note, I notice that my KFM project does not work in IE8b1, even though it works in IE7, FF, Konqueror, Safari, etc. So the problems are not purely CSS-related…

  3. Yeah I’ve noticed stupid breakages though, with stuff ie7 can handle. It seems the version targeting emulation mode works ok though. Dunno if you noticed the big uproar about version targeting or not!

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