Microsoft released a significant upgrade to its Internet Explorer web browser this afternoon. The first edition of IE 8 was for developers, and Microsoft suggests that anybody who browses or uses the web, will love IE 8 beta 2.
During the last year, Internet Explorer’s market share lost six points, falling to 73 percent, still not a number to scoff at. Adversely, during the last year, Firefox’s market share rose by 19 percent. But still, Firefox and Safari have a long way to go before they can make a dent in IE’s dominance.
“We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services),” the IE team reports.
I still don’t hear anything about speed, reliability or overall performance. Does anyone else think this still sounds like fluff?
The IE team continues to explain, “We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we’ll take a more holistic approach. That’s how we built the product and how we’d like to talk about it.”
ZDNet’s Ed Bott calls this a “top-to-bottom makeover.” He continues to say that “It’s packed with usability improvements, security enhancements, and a platform for new add-ins that third-party developers are already taking advantage of.”
It seems as though Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team especially, are still focusing on the wrong issues. Moving into Windows 7, after Vista (hopefully ASAP), is IE 8 still going to be all we get with a Windows machine? Will my first download still be Firefox on any PC I touch? Microsoft has the chance to turn things around here, and instead, they are focusing on surface elements while adding in features like “InPrivate” browsing mode. Which they explain as the following:
“Sometimes you don’t want to leave any trace of specific web browsing activity, such as when checking e-mail at an Internet café or shopping for a gift on a family PC. InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no evidence of your browsing or search history.”
Sounds like glorified “porn mode” to me.
Additionally, as a web developer myself, I have grown accustomed to writing code that works around Internet Explorer’s quirky non-standard adhering ways. Now, with Microsoft’s default, standards-compliant IE8, some sites are rendering poorly because they were “hacked” together to work in previous versions of IE. So, essentially this is a positive for the community and universally for web standards. But, if you, or anybody you know uses IE workarounds in their code, tell them to double check how it’s rendering in IE 8.
Hopefully Microsoft can turn things around in the future, rebuild IE from the ground up, start from scratch, give us a brand new interface, new graphics, new icon, the whole shebang. Maybe then we’ll have a contender on our hands. But then again, they have 74% market share, they don’t need to try.
I ask you IE Team… “How good can it feel to be #1 because your users don’t know they have another choice?”
Visit – Windows IE 8
Visit – Safari
Visit – Firefox
[via DigitalDaily]
