IE8: How's everyone liking it, so far?

Wowbagger

The Infinitely Prolonged
Wowbagger
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I think it's good stuff. The built-in dev tools, and improved built-in source code viewer are good.

I know Firefox has had much of that since, like, forever, but MS seems to have gotten their act together, and rolled their own, very nicely.

And, the Compatability View button comes in handy, too. It's a nice comprimise between using the older, legacy IE engine, and seriously promoting the new, mostly-standards-based one.
 
Wowbagger said:
I think it's good stuff. The built-in dev tools, and improved built-in source code viewer are good.

I know Firefox has had much of that since, like, forever, but MS seems to have gotten their act together, and rolled their own, very nicely.

And, the Compatability View button comes in handy, too. It's a nice comprimise between using the older, legacy IE engine, and seriously promoting the new, mostly-standards-based one.
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I'm sure there were some improvements. I will have to start working on porting to wine and getting my testing VM's up to speed.

I am fearful it still is a hog, however.
 
paximperium said:
Give me a good reason to switch from Firefox back to IE.
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There is no reason to do so. I am not trying to sell IE over Firefox. I am trying to sell IE8 over, say, IE7. And, in doing so, I am mentioning, in passing, that it finally has many of the better developer-related features Firefox had for a long time.

You don't have to be committed to a switchover, anyway. You can have both installed and running, at the same time, on a PC, you know.

But, in case you are looking for a reason: It seems like IE8 initially starts up faster than Firefox, on most systems. Not that it matters much, 'cause once they do start up, their performance isn't much different. But, whatever.

As a professional software developer, who is "hopelessly" locked into the Microsoft Way of development, I like to keep my systems updated with the latest Microsoft stuff. But, none of the rest of you need to suffer with any of it.

If there is, perchance, anyone else out there running IE8: What do YOU think of it? Nevermind these skeptical freaks who won't even bother downloading it. Thanks!
 
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I just upgraded from IE7 to IE8 yesterday and three things stand out after using it for a day or so:

1. IE8 is substantially faster than IE7 in just about every context I have tried so far
2. The search function in IE8 is very nicely implemented compared with the archaic system in IE7
3. The colouring of related tabs, while initially distracting, is actually quite handy now I am used to it.

So far I am very impressed with IE8 compared with IE7.
 
Wowbagger said:
There is no reason to do so. I am not trying to sell IE over Firefox. I am trying to sell IE8 over, say, IE7. And, in doing so, I am mentioning, in passing, that it finally has many of the better developer-related features Firefox had for a long time.

You don't have to be committed to a switchover, anyway. You can have both installed and running, at the same time, on a PC, you know.

But, in case you are looking for a reason: It seems like IE8 initially starts up faster than Firefox, on most systems. Not that it matters much, 'cause once they do start up, their performance isn't much different. But, whatever.

As a professional software developer, who is "hopelessly" locked into the Microsoft Way of development, I like to keep my systems updated with the latest Microsoft stuff. But, none of the rest of you need to suffer with any of it.

If there is, perchance, anyone else out there running IE8: What do YOU think of it? Nevermind these skeptical freaks who won't even bother downloading it. Thanks!
Click to expand...

I agree with this. Let's avoid the holy wars over which browser is better and stick to ie7 vs ie8. Many of us (myself included) have to regularly test things on IE vs another single browser. That is due to this simple graph:

http://fowlsoundproductions.com/pictures/iedesign.jpg

Wowbagger I'll get one of my VM's updated tonight and let you know what I think.
 
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I like the chart. I gave up using div tags and CSS for most layout purposes, long ago.

Though, I am more of a business-logic programmer, than a designer. So, if someone else thinks they can design my "at-least-functional" web pages better than I can, they can be my guest. (Especially if it also has to look right in IE6! WTF is up with IE6?!)
 
Ducky said:
I agree with this. Let's avoid the holy wars over which browser is better and stick to ie7 vs ie8. Many of us (myself included) have to regularly test things on IE vs another single browser. That is due to this simple graph:

[qimg]http://fowlsoundproductions.com/pictures/iedesign.jpg[/qimg]

Wowbagger I'll get one of my VM's updated tonight and let you know what I think.
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Funny thing: my better half doesn't spend time that way. That's not to say she doesn't do the cross-browser checking, but most of the work consists of two things: 1) making sure what works in FF works in IE, and 2) trying to make sure what works in FF and IE also works at least close to that way in older browsers (especially IE).

Speaking of 8-- I find it to be mostly 'meh'. It's snappy enough, but not enough to make me want to start updating my computers to it. I'll gladly wait until WU pushes it out. In the meantime, I'll keep it in testing mode.
 
Wowbagger said:
I like the chart. I gave up using div tags and CSS for most layout purposes, long ago.

Though, I am more of a business-logic programmer, than a designer. So, if someone else thinks they can design my "at-least-functional" web pages better than I can, they can be my guest. (Especially if it also has to look right in IE6! WTF is up with IE6?!)
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Ha! You're the type of guy my better half is always complaining about! Those back-end developers who keep littering her pages with tables and FrontPage tags. You guys are where she spends a full third of her time cleaning up after!

In fairness, the guys she usually complains about are Russian. ;)
 
Frontpage?

Anyone using Frontpage for design should be strung up and horsewhipped.

ETA:

For the same reason anyone using iWeb for design should be strung up and horsewhipped.
 
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Yeah, I was making a (very) gross generalization there. Most web developers I know use Dreamweaver. Even the Microsoft ad developers!

I don't know if anyone remembers a little 'haha' moment with a Microsoft banner ad. It was an animated ad with some web code in it being created. I think the ad was for FrontPage, but the code in the ad was actually Dreamweaver tags. Fun times. Kind of reminds me of the recent Microsoft Research video for that music creation software (Songsmith) that has Macbooks with stickers over the Apple logo.

 
GreNME said:
Ha! You're the type of guy my better half is always complaining about! Those back-end developers who keep littering her pages with tables and FrontPage tags. You guys are where she spends a full third of her time cleaning up after!
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Not me. My HTML is always clean and minimal. I never use "special FrontPage" anything. In fact, I keep most of my newer work fully CSS and XHTML compliant. And, ASP.NET 3.5 is actually decent when it comes to clean page tags, at least at design time. At run-time it becomes a slightly different story, but designers generally don't need to care much about what goes on at run-time.

Ducky said:
Frontpage?

Anyone using Frontpage for design should be strung up and horsewhipped.
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Whew, that's a relief. I use Expression Web....

....But, generally, ONLY for spell checking! Visual Studio does not have a built-in HTML spellchecker. I wish it did. But, since it doesn't I usually write significant portions of text, for web use, in Expression Web, and port it over to VS.
I don't use Word, 'cause it doesn't generate clean code, even in "filtered" form. And, I know what it's like picking "special Office" tags out of that gunk.
 
Not only is that video full of lulz for the macbook in it, it's terrible enough that I died inside a little watching it.

At least Apple's marketing of Garageband wasn't so completely lame as to make people want to turn off the video showcasing it.
 
Wowbagger said:
Not me. My HTML is always clean and minimal. I never use "special FrontPage" anything. In fact, I keep most of my newer work fully CSS and XHTML compliant. And, ASP.NET 3.5 is actually decent when it comes to clean page tags, at least at design time. At run-time it becomes a slightly different story, but designers generally don't need to care much about what goes on at run-time.

Whew, that's a relief. I use Expression Web....

....But, generally, ONLY for spell checking! Visual Studio does not have a built-in HTML spellchecker. I wish it did. But, since it doesn't I usually write significant portions of text, for web use, in Expression Web, and port it over to VS.
I don't use Word, 'cause it doesn't generate clean code, even in "filtered" form. And, I know what it's like picking "special Office" tags out of that gunk.
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No, you were right. She corrected me when I mentioned it to her. It wasn't FP stuff at all-- it was Visual Studio's extraneous code.

Then again, if you're working with mostly ASP.Net stuff then you're not the ones she complains about. It's the guys using VS to work on back-end SQL stuff that drives her nuts, since the front-end stuff they crank out is usually messy and overloaded with unnecessary tags.
 
GreNME said:
No, you were right. She corrected me when I mentioned it to her. It wasn't FP stuff at all-- it was Visual Studio's extraneous code.

Then again, if you're working with mostly ASP.Net stuff then you're not the ones she complains about. It's the guys using VS to work on back-end SQL stuff that drives her nuts, since the front-end stuff they crank out is usually messy and overloaded with unnecessary tags.
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Sigh.

Why have so few developers heard of "less is more"?

Then again, I should add perspective. Just now I threw a rock out the window and hit a guy who was a "web developer."
 
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