Internet Explorer 8 coming soon
After crushing Netscape into smithereens, Microsoft rested on its monopolistic laurels and let Internet Explorer (IE) molder. Not only did IE6 grow stale but its poor conformity with Web standards and its peculiar rendering of CSS gave webmasters fits. Then Firefox came along and began taking a nice chunk of market share. After doing almost nothing with IE6 for years, Microsoft finally felt prodded enough to develop IE7. While IE7 was an improvement over IE6, Mozilla kept right on improving its browser and Firefox 3 is easily the winner over IE 7. Once aroused by real competition, however, Microsoft can come up with good products and it is now on the verge of releasing IE 8, currently in beta 2. The beta has been getting good reviews and it will be interesting to see what the final product is like. Meanwhile, Mozilla isn’t sitting around and the beta of the next variation Firefox 3.1 is already getting some praise.
Isn’t competition grand?
Update: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a review where he compares IE8 and Firefox 3.01. His conclusion:
It’s pretty clear from these basic tests that Internet Explorer 8 has a long way to go if it is to catch up with Firefox 3.0 in terms of JavaScript performance and CSS web standard compliance [UPDATE: Whoops, I meant web standards compliance, not CSS, I was still thinking in ACID 2 mode …].
However, I think that it is worth pointing out that when it comes to performance, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is three times faster than the Internet Explorer 7. ACID 3 compliance however isn’t much better than that offered by Internet Explorer 7.
IE8b2 report card: C- … Could do better, much better.
Update2: Here’s the conclusion of a review from Ars Technica.
IE8 has me surprised. Internet Explorer has fallen a long way behind Safari, Opera, and Firefox. IE7 brought the much-needed tabs, but was still a long way behind the competing browsers. And honestly, even IE8 hasn’t caught up with the competition. But it’s a great deal closer than I thought it would be. The standards compliance is certainly still a big issue, and the reality is that IE8 still won’t be nearly as good on that front as the other three major browsers. Nonetheless, as an overall package, IE8 is a far better product than its predecessor.
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