Look Out, Firefox 3 — IE8 Is Back On Top For Now 662
CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla reviewed it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode,' new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. There's one big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."
Possibly incorrect (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Possibly incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Won't be released until Noon EST.
How about multiple reviews Slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's New Browser Is Better, but Still Not Best [washingtonpost.com]
It still fails Acid Test 3 (Score:2, Informative)
After using the beta and RC1... (Score:3, Informative)
This causes problems with IE8 since it is closer to being correct; these "fixes" throw it off. I am sure that sites will begin to change as IE8 use spreads. Until IE6 finally dies (still has 20% market share) though, I am saddened that the world is still suffer with IE hacks.
One bad thing, reverting back to IE7 is pretty much impossible in most cases.
Another, some old Active X controls do not work.
Ok, one more, they use an interconnected process model like Chrome so that the whole world does not crash when one bad page causes problems. Yeah, that is a great idea, but in my experience, it locks your whole machine and crashes every instance. Boo!
Re:Firefox will continue to be superior (Score:5, Informative)
http://ieaddons.com/ [ieaddons.com]
Actually, IE has many, many plugins. You might even recognize some familiar names from Mozilla-land, eg. Foxmarks, StumbleUpon, Cooliris, ....
Re:Security? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Security? (Score:3, Informative)
Accelerators are most useful for people who are on dialup or slower broadband connections to download possible future pages while they are looking at the existing one. It makes their life, as in your [clients|customers|visitors] browsing experience better.
If you don't want accelerators hitting your site, don't have a public site. Or deploy counter measures that block or limit the accelerators. Don't bitch and moan about visitors (or potential visitors) leeching your bandwidth when you put it out there for them to consume.
Re:No add-ins? (Score:5, Informative)
The article just basically got it wrong on that front.
Re:Security? (Score:5, Informative)
Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Let's say, for example, that you're on a Web page with an address on it. Highlight the address, and then choose a maps accelerator, and you'll see a map of the address displayed in a flyaway -- a kind of pop-up on the page -- or else on another tab, depending on how that particular accelerator was written. You can interact with the flyaway map just as if you were on the map site itself.
Re:A quick Google search (Score:5, Informative)
And with a thought to those that might read this in the future, it reads: ..."
"Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) indicates the end of the Internet
Re:Security? (Score:3, Informative)
Did you RTFA? These "accelerators" are merely additions which allow users to retrieve related content without leaving a webpage. Highlighting a street address and having a map appear is mentioned as an example.
Re:Best attribute (Score:4, Informative)
No. In that case, "asploded" is the correct term.
Re:Best attribute (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best attribute (Score:5, Informative)
Nevermind that /. comment links don't work in IE8 unless you enable compatability mode for the site. Additionally this comment box for replies, even in compatability mode, extends far off to the right and blows out the formatting for the site.
There are still issues with the rendering engine and IE8 should NOT have gone live yet.
All of that stuff works in FF.
Re:no and yes (Score:5, Informative)
> No data, just anecdotes
The problem is that actually measuring things gives different results... When Firefox 3 was measured head to head against other web browsers, it used less memory pretty consistently.
> Is browsing the web really so hard that it takes more memory and processing to do it
> than Eclipse and Outlook combined?
In a word, "maybe". Depends on the sites you're loading and what they do.
> It's using roughly twice what IE6 would use under the same circumstances.
You mean you've tried the same browsing pattern on the same sites and IE6 has 2x less memory usage? Or you have memories of how much IE6 used on some other set of pages some other time? Or something else?
> there's got to be a way to make it so that it's not the heaviest thing running on my
> machine
Not really, if it's the most heavily used app that has to do the most things... If you have 7 tabs worth of web applications open, then one would expect memory usage to be approximately equivalent to having 7 desktop applications open; if it's not, that's great.
Seriously, though, it's not uncommon for the browser to have to run several hundred kilobytes (no, I'm not making this up) of script when loading a web page. Let's take a simple example: http://www.cnn.com./ [www.cnn.com] This has about 95KB of HTML (including inline scripts and such) and links to 270KB of external scripts. Those scripts do various stuff that creates objects and are generally poor at dropping object references. Which means that while the page is open, every object it's created will typically still be around: it can't be garbage collected, because the page is still referencing it.
This is not to say that memory usage can't be improved; it can be and people are working on it. Same for CPU usage. In particular, the "cpu being used all the time" thing is a serious problem that's being looked into. A lot of that is in fact Flash being stupid (easy to test how much by disabling Flash), but not all. But in the end, Firefox is not particularly more "bloated" than any other browser that does similar things in terms of web compat and rendering (yes, it's more memory-hungry than lynx, I agree).
Re:Best attribute (Score:5, Informative)
If you're still using Firefox for something other than Web Developer and Firebug, I'd be willing to say you're doing it wrong.
I run Linux you insensitive clod.
Re:A quick Google search (Score:3, Informative)
And in case anyone in the futures wonders why the result appears as it is, here is the original quote:
Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) indicates the end of the Internet Explorer 8 beta period.
That page has already been changed to say
This final release of Internet Explorer 8 is about delivering a browsing experience for all that is richer, easier, and more secure.
so, expect the Google search result to change real soon now.
Re:Add-ins (Score:5, Informative)
I don't consider myself a Microsoft apologist, I'm just allergic to bullshit so I try to combat it wherever and whenever I see it. On Slashdot, when talking about Microsoft, it's all over the place.
Whether or not IE's addins are good or completely suck, whether or not there exists an ad-blocker addin for IE, the simple fact of the matter is that IE *does* have addins, and *has* had addins for longer than Firefox has existed.
I can't go through and cover your entire list, but I do know that there's an IE addin to do DOM Inspection. I use it all the time. The aforementioned Google Toolbar does a lot of page manipulation, as well, like highlighting search results. I wouldn't be surprised if every item in your list exists in IE. (Except perhaps for "3D bookmark management", what does that even mean?)
Re:Best attribute (Score:5, Informative)
Given the KHTML/WebKit guys' reputation for actually targeting the spec (as opposed to Gecko--hello, moz-* CSS attributes), when there's a discrepancy between Gecko and WebKit, I'm going to assume that WebKit does it more correctly unless evidence to the contrary can be found.
Both WebKit and Gecko have experimental CSS properties that they safely isolate under a namespace using an obvious prefix. Here are a couple of examples.
x-moz-border-radius-topleft: 7px;
x-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 7px;
This is considered a safe way to extend CSS. Any web site with a standards-compliant CSS is unaffected by the browser's ability to do something with these properties. Furthermore, any web site that uses these experimental properties will gracefully degrade to a box with square corners when visited by a browser that does not recognize them. In the future, when rounded corners are in an official CSS spec, both Gecko and Mozilla can merely tie this behaviour to whatever the CSS spec calls this property.
This is very unlike the bad old days of exerimenting with changes to HTML. Both Gecko and WebKit are doing the right thing here.
Re:Add-ins (Score:5, Informative)
Which is to say that you're unwilling to see the other side of the issue. You'd rather find some way to slip an argument through the needle?
Only if you're nitpicking language. Firefox add-ins are technologically similar in principle to what IE is capable of, but not the same at all from a user's perspective. From a user's perspective, they open the add-on manager, search for something cool, install it, and get new features in their browser that are embedded deep into its function. With IE, they can get a toolbar installed with various software (often whether intended to install it or not) that adds more useless buttons for them to click. How is the experience even remotely comparable? And some functionality is presented as an ActiveX control or ActiveX plugin. Which is yet another different thing that the user doesn't associate.
Basically, Internet Explorer has nothing like this catalog: https://addons.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]
That's what a user believes. And they're more or less correct from the perspective they're looking at it.
Slight misspeak on my part. It's 3D Tab Management I was thinking of.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8879 [mozilla.org]
3D bookmark management is a different browser. ;-)
Re:Best attribute (Score:4, Informative)
Just some clarification, the "x" in front of the above properties is a character that I added to "comment out" (in a sense) these properties from a file I was working on. (Changing them to a name that no browser recognizes is a convenient way to dike them out, anyway.) I didn't mean to include them when I pasted them into the above post. The actual properties are:
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 7px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 7px;
Re:Best attribute (Score:3, Informative)
linkie... [wikia.com]
Little bit over-advertised (Score:3, Informative)
Reading the article, it reads more like "Welcome to the 21'st Century Microsoft - you're doing *so* much better than you were . . ."
There are some nice features - that I have already via firefox extensions (colored tabs).
There are some buggy features that I don't particularly see the point of (What exactly does webslices do that RSS doesn't?)
And the security is, supposedly, finally up to what I expect from any other browser five years ago. One hopes.
So we have a bunch of features, most of which belong in extensionspace, a number of them buggy, and some of them we're frankly accepting Microsoft's word that they're vastly improved, and this is referred to as 'Leapfrogging'.
Kinda like how my Mom was so proud of me when I was seven and she actually started having to pay attention when we played chess, except I don't have that emotional investment in Microsoft.
Okey dokey then.
Pug