Mountain Dew Sprite

Don_HH2K's Blog

Don tryeth, Don hacketh, and Don gaveth up.
posts - 145, comments - 531, trackbacks - 0

Internet Explorer 8

Is it me, or does this post-install process seem a bit excessive? I took these at the first launch of IE8, so the other five or six steps in the installer itself aren’t included in these ten… I don’t even remember Netscape 6 having this many pestering install dialogs.

I'm still wondering what to make of this review just yet. There's definitely been progress made, but in true Microsoft fashion, it seems to just be mostly improvements to technologies already available elsewhere. The unofficial Googlebar extension (the same one I was using way back when with Netscape 7.1, mind you) could do a lot of what Accelerators do now; I already have a Private Browsing mode in the Firefox betas I use; Pu7o even had colored tabs in his Firescape browser way back in 2006 via the ColorfulTabs addon that had been out even earlier. And let’s face it: Web Slices seem too much like overglorified RSS feeds to me – at least the spec is in the public domain now. This is catch-up, not ingenuity.

I’ll be interested to see what others think of the browser, more specifically if it ends up winning back some users while shunning even more over to something else. I, for one, am once again thoroughly unimpressed.

Print | posted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:40 PM | Filed Under [ Software Photo ]

Feedback

Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

Took the beta for a spin back when it came out and thought "eh..", took the RC (I believe) for a spin in the 7 beta and thought "hmm...". I may actually install it later.

And, thankfully, IE 8 will help kill the last users of IE 6. Thanks, Microsoft!
3/19/2009 10:40 PM | Dave
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

Don, you might want to check out this old page. Please forgive me on the poor English in that page. To be fair, I think you should discount the first two confirmation dialogues.

Without a doubt that you are not impressed, it is very hard to satisfy your extremely high standard and requirement.
3/19/2009 10:49 PM | dark skinned Antony
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

I'll review it after I get XP installed in VPC 2007. Since VPC 2004 wouldn't install in XP x64, 'm not really that happy. I can't install the VM additions for Windows 95 anymore. I could always install VPC 2004 in VPC 2007 and run 95 through that. Or I could use VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.
3/20/2009 12:51 AM | Dave
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

I tried it, and to be honest, I wasn't that impressed. Never really liked Internet Explorer.
3/20/2009 6:37 PM | John Egenhofer
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

I'm guessing the user agent still spoofs itself as Netscape 4.0?
3/20/2009 9:31 PM | Andrew T.
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

Yeah, it still does:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0)

But, at least it's an improvement over IE 7, or the garbage known as IE 6.
3/20/2009 10:01 PM | Dave
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

Guess you haven't tried opening Slashdot (or another rather sluggish web page) in both Firefox and IE 8 6 times, while browsing another page. Which browser is faster? IE 8 of course! Chrome and the latest Safari would most likely perform the same. The reason why I don't use any of those browsers as my default? AdBlock Plus. Or more specifically, add-ons. That's one place that Firefox reigns.

Should Chrome or Safari support add-ons, I might actually switch over. Until then, it's venerable old Firefox for me.
3/22/2009 5:31 PM | Dave
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

Slashdot seems to take a lot longer to load in IE8 (tried both 64-bit and 32-bit) than in the 64-bit build of Firefox. I got 1.809 seconds using the Extended Statusbar extension in Firefox, but about 3.4 seconds on a stopwatch in IE.
3/22/2009 8:35 PM | Don_HH2K
Gravatar

# re: Internet Explorer 8

I went back to x86 Windows (again). Sim City 2000 wouldn't run in it no matter what I did (be it extract the files and add the required registry settings) or running it in Virtual PC on Windows 95.

I didn't test it on the x64 build of Firefox, so I wouldn't know. But IE 8 has tabs run as individual processes (as does Chrome) for better stability, and perhaps better performance.
3/22/2009 9:22 PM | Dave

Post Comment

Title  
Name  
Email
Url
Comment   
Please add 5 and 3 and type the answer here: