IE8 Beta Released To Public

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Re:Oh, I'd like a version

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs on Linux under Wine or any number of Virtual Machines, for those not too clueless to know about them.

What is really worrying is...

[Pvt_Ryan]

timesonline.co.uk [timesonline.co.uk] Writes:

Once the setting is chosen, others using the same computer will not be able to see which sites have been accessed. Other browsers have similar functions, but this one is far more prominent. Although casual users cannot see the previous user's search history, authorities such as the police will be able to access it if necessary.

So basically the data still exists, just people who nothing will not be able to see it, I knew we were wrong in all those security model that try and keep the experts out. It's really Joe "average" Blogs we should have been protecting against all this time.. DOH!!!

I'll definitely be surrendering Firefox for IE now..

Re:Oh, I'd like a version

[morgan_greywolf]

You want MS to provide a linux version so that you can either state your intent to never install it, or so that you can sh*t on it? I'm sure they'll get right on that...

No need to wait for MS to do that. I'm sure this will be in ies4linux [tatanka.com.br] eventually, thanks to Sérgio. Want it sooner? Donate time or money to either ies4linux or to Wine. Or both.

Re:Standards-complient or not?

[Khuffie]

According to Ars Technica [arstechnica.com], sites with proper HTML information will display in standards mode, and sites without will not. There's a button at the bottom that allows you to switch between the two. I have to say, I like IE8. It won't make me switch from Opera, but it's much speedier to use than IE7, and I'll probably find myself using it instead of Firefox whenever I come across a website that doesn't work in Opera. (Which is rare, and whenever that happens and I launch Firefox, it prompts me if I want to update, which gets annoying).

Re:Browser privacy

[morgan_greywolf]

Use Opera Portable [kejut.com]. It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit. And it's had that feature for several years. Perfect for visiting internet cafes or libraries.

Re:Standards-complient or not?

[ByOhTek]

DAMNIT

I didn't mean entomology, I meant etymology...

But, using both the original and current meaning, that was a nice error...

Re:Standards-complient or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, entomology is the study of insects, the word you wanted was etymology

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[will_die]

According to the European and thier language report [europa.eu] German is the 2nd highest known language in the EU at 32% of the population speaking the language. Spanish is at 15% and is 5th.
For the top 5 it is:
English 51%
German 32%
French 26%
Italian 16%
Spanish 15%

Also by mother tounue German is at 18% and Spanish is at 9%

Took it for a whirl and discovered, 30 seconds...

[Assmasher]

...later that the link option "Open in New Window" doesn't appear to function anymore. Well done Microsoft.

Lots of IT/Legal Depts. won't like InPrivate

[Jumperalex]

What I'm really curious to see, and I can only assume it will be there, is if they also include the ability to LOCK-OUT the InPrivate feature. Many corporate (and especially government) IT/legal departments excplicitly WANT your browsing to be tracked. Sure I can go in and delete stuff manually (except when I am not given permissions to access that folder ... which I'm not) but right now all of our standard desktop configurations prevent you from clicking the "clear private data" button.

So not only are the advertisers (as I've read elsewhere) possibly not going to like this feature, but many corp/gov types won't install it until/unless they can excplicitly prevent its use.

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[TheP4st]

Native Spanish speaking population in the world 330 million
Native German speaking population in the world 100 million

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[nhstar]

Opera is a good choice, and a fine browser. And it is still, hands-down best for testing standards compliance (in my humble opinion).

The only real fault they made at getting market share was waiting as long as they did before making it available for free. I don't pretend to know the finer-points of their business model, or Mozilla's for that matter, but people saw two browsers available gratis and one where you paid $35us (if i remember right...). If you could buy a Porsche or or have a VW, which would you be driving?

Re:Standards-complient or not?

[wwahammy]

It passes the ACID 2 test on its default settings. I'm using it right now in fact (I like the IE RSS reader) and it actually renders Slashdot correctly. IE7 has been a disaster for the last few months on Slashdot. Not sure what changed but it didn't work at all.

Is it compliant with every single standard Firefox is? No. CSS Selectors I know is an area that still isn't up the standard. It is a lot closer than IE7 is though.

Re:Crash recovery...

[Dude McDude]

Implementing a feature Opera has had for years, now that's what I call innovation.

Opera doesn't recover tabs. If a webpage crashes it takes Opera down with it. IE8's crash handling gracefully closes/reopens the offending tab without having to close the browser.

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[jorx]

Opera wasn't free until Firefox existed... so, there's that...

Re:Reboot

[Dude McDude]

I was prompted to reboot once it was installed.

Re:Lots of IT/Legal Depts. won't like InPrivate

[Hanners1979]

I'd fully expect all of that those kind of settings to be available via Group Policy, you've been able to configure most of IE's major settings across your network that way for some time now.

Re:Running multiple versions of IE

[Dude McDude]

And if I upgrade to IE8, I can't test against IE7 or IE6.

You should be able to test against IE7 using IE8's compatibility mode [msdn.com]

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[GIL_Dude]

Actually almost all Microsoft Beta code is available in the same languages at first - English, German, Japanese, and sometimes Simplified Chinese. The thing is that they are trying for coverage of the code to make sure localizations fit dialogs, etc. For example, of the languages that use an English like character set (what is it called, Roman or whatever), German tends to have the longest words / phrases. So by covering German they find out whether all of the localizations are going to fit in the space provided. In a similar way, by covering Japanese (and in this case Simplified Chinese) they are covering localizations in non-Roman character sets. Its really not about the number of users / speakers - its about the coverage of testing on the localizations and getting them to fit properly.

Re:Lots of IT/Legal Depts. won't like InPrivate

[Jellybob]

Any IT department that *really* wants your browsing history is going to route any traffic on port 80 through a proxy, so they can get reports on what you've been doing from one central location, instead of having to trawl through every user's history. The InPrivate feature isn't going to stop that being possible, so IT departments are fine.

Re: your wifes browser .. :)

[rs232]

"I never quite undershood how any firefox user thinks it's normal that you'd have to get extentions to do so many simple tasks .."

Yea, selecting 'Tools->add-ons->Get Extensions' is so much more complicated .. :)

'I love when firefox gets updated, and she says "Well we just got (x new feature)". And I can reply, "About time, I've been using that for a year now."'

What 'features' are you refering to that have been around now for a year, apart from 'automatic crash recovery' and 'browser privacy' ?

Personally, I never needed to discuss browser 'features' across the breakfast table . .:)

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[Beezlebub33]

Spanish is at 15% and is 5th.

That's in the EU. Off the top of my head I would say it's second (possibly first) in North America, and certainly first in South America.

I don't think so on the last one. Around 50% of the population of South America is in Brazil, and for them it's Portuguese (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_america [wikipedia.org]). If you look at the statistics for internet users in South America, it's going to be Portuguese as well.

Re:Oh, I'd like a version

[Tim C]

I thought that IEtab used the native MSHTML.dll, and thus would still require IE (and presumably Windows)

Re:Running multiple versions of IE

[Anonymous Coward]

You're looking for IE Tester [my-debugbar.com].
It does pretty much what you describe, and even goes back to IE5.5.

Dear Mods: It's spelled "Funny" :)

[Penguinisto]

The Stealther extension [mozilla.org] for Firefox already does the privacy thing, and has done so for longer than IE 8.

(Speakin' of which, I wonder if the old Anonym.OS live cd is still useable...)

/P
 

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[psychodelicacy]

But the bulk of that figure for Spanish is made up of people living in Latin America, where studies [ox.ac.uk] suggest only a relatively small percentage of the population uses the internet. Cuba [theinquirer.net] has only recently begun allowing PCs in private homes. Some countries in Latin America have less than 3% of the population using the internet; Germany has over 40% (Data refers to years 2004-06; Source [un.org]) Personal computer ownership per 100 is generally much lower than internet usage per 100 in Latin America, suggesting that this is also a market that can't necessarily choose which software is installed on the computers used.

So, in terms of numbers there are certainly more Spanish-speakers out there using the internet, but a lot of them are in situations where internet usage is rationed and/or not entirely under the user's control. In contrast, Germany has a high rate of internet usage and a high take-up of Firefox - and most users are probably using their own machines, not internet cafes or the like. The figures don't, at first, seem to make sense, but when you take into account the low rates of internet usage and computer ownership in the majority of Spanish-speaking countries, it begins to seem less anomalous.

Dang

[LWATCDR]

When I first went to the download page it looked terrible. I thought they had written an IE only page! Then I fired up Opera and it looked fine.
Did a refresh on Firefox and it was fine!
I hate it when Microsoft doesn't give me a reason to crab about them!
Wait I just went to grab silverlight! Cool they don't support FF3 those bastards!!!!
Anyway it is worth trying out just to see how well it works.

Still not 100% complient with CSS2

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't get CSS generated content images [w3.org] right. That's four years old and all other modern browsers can do it. Bah.

Hmmm - clicking favorites crashes IE8..

[GuyverDH]

Installed it.

Kept google as search engine.
declined accelerators
declined web screening

turned off view of favorites, menu bar.

click favorite button that appears next to tabs, crash...

repeat the experiment...

uninstalled IE8 3 minutes after installing...

Re:Standards-complient or not?

[ShieldW0lf]

Nonsense. IE remains the majority browser. Developers who want to actually produce a product that works correctly for the majority of users target IE first (because Firefox usually does the right thing when dealing with IE-isms, and IE-isms are easier to undo to target Firefox than vice versa).

No, developers use Firefox to do their development. Why? Because of extensions like Web Developer [mozilla.org] and Firebug [mozilla.org] and YSlow [mozilla.org] and Selenium [mozilla.org] and Firecookie [mozilla.org] and FirePHP [mozilla.org] and Venkman [mozilla.org]. To name a few.

The fact that Firefox is also highly standards compliant is a bonus.

After you've used all these tools to get your application working properly, that's when you check it out in IE and see if there are any problems that need further attention.

As for the whole trustworthiness angle, well, call it FUD if you want. It's easy enough to submit code for independent critical review. When organizations don't choose to do so, the uncertainty and doubt that remains is real and intentionally created. Personally, I don't use MS products any more for anything outside of testing my web apps in IE, and have no intention of ever doing so again. I do not choose to trust them.

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[pcolaman]

They primarily speak Portuguese, not Spanish.

Re:So what?

[jrumney]

The number of hindi speakers is probably 4 times that.

It's about 1.1 times that actually, there's almost the same gap between Hindi and Spanish as there is between native Spanish and English speakers. Mandarin on the other hand has almost as many speakers as those three combined.

Re:new features not in Firefox ..

[et764]

Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.

Ahh, you haven't actually seen IE8's automatic crash recovery feature then. Each of the tabs are isolated from each other, so if one tab crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser. The tab just goes away and then pops back up with a message saying IE recovered the tab. It's definitely not the same thing as "Restore Previous Session."

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[Hyppy]

much like 'axe'/'ax' instead of 'ask

So, in your observation, citizens of the United States speak African American Vernacular English?

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft localizes into several languages early in product development. They are usually German, Japanese or Chinese, and Arabic or Hebrew. These languages are chosen because they allow for the broadest coverage of localizability testing without going through the time and expense of localizing every language on early builds of the product.

German is chosen because it has very long words.
Japanese or Chinese are chosen to get a glyph-based complex script language.
Arabic or Hebrew are chosen to get RTL testing.

You don't find many product bugs when you test in a language like Spanish. You do find quite a few when you localize to German ("text in dialog foo is clipped because all of the words localize to 34783 characters long")

Re:Excellent feature...

[pizzach]

..that will definitely be craved by many Slashdot users, and not because of the gift shopping or use of public terminals. Question is how long it will take before Firefox sees its market share diminish because of this feature, and, consequently, how long it will take Firefox to include it in an update.

Considering that private browsing appears to already be included with 3.1 and the betas were around Sept 9th the last time I checked, I don't think the Moz folks are quaking in their boots yet. The feature is likely to hit both browsers roughtly at the same time.

http://ostatic.com/168982-blog/are-you-ready-for-firefox-3-1 [ostatic.com]

Re:Hmmm - clicking favorites crashes IE8..

[Anonymous Coward]

I had that problem too. Went into the Add-Ins manager and removed all three of the Google Toolbar addins -- that seemed to fix the problem.

Re:So what?

[jrumney]

Hindi is not the national language, it is a national language, one of several including English. And considering that around a third of India's population is illiterate, second languages are not as widely spoken as you would think.

Re:Shows what competion can do.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use internet and my computer every single day of my life. As the matter of fact I'm a Programmer... and I live in Mexico, can we stop using stupid stereotypes?.
Although I agree that Germany is _very_ IT active (in KDE for example several of the contributors are Germans).

Re:Running multiple versions of IE

[eddy the lip]

Everyone's posting this, but you've got the current high-score ;) I've used Multiple IE, and it mostly works, but I've run into a few issues. One is the recent forced-upgrade to Vista, which Multiple IE doesn't run on (yet), so I can't use it on my main dev box. I still have an XP machine around, but I've come across some weird issues there as well. One has either something to do with cookies or forwarding, which makes even logging in to some online apps impossible. Testing against IE6 on a virtual image of XP there's no such problem. Cost me a morning of headaches yesterday, though, before I gave up trying to fix it and re-installed the image from MS (stupid time limited image.) I applaud TredoSoft for the effort, but those edge cases can be a bitch.