Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Launches at Noon | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Launches at Noon

dailytech.com

36 pointsarthurk40 comments

Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but could this be the final nail in IE6's coffin?

At a minimum, I guess it's more ammunition to justify not supporting IE6, since it's now two major versions (and 8 years) behind the most recent.

Unfortunately, I think this means that the pragmatic web dev now has to learn about three versions of IE.

And as far as I've seen they all have separate sets of bugs.

Yep. My workload just went up another notch. I'm sure my clients will be grateful for the opportunity to fork over more money to work around Microsoft's refusal to embrace an open standard.

Incidentally, I've been using multiple VMs to test multiple versions of IE. But it is now apparent (well, more apparent) that this method cannot scale. Has anyone had luck with these tools that can install multiple versions of IE at the same time, like this one: "Internet Explorer Collection"?

http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm

Is this what I should have been using all along?

I've found multiple IE's (Google for it) running on XP Pro in Parallels on OS X with a connection open to my localhost (back on the Mac side) to be an OK solution. I can edit in TextMate and refresh the cohesive IE window, be it 6, 7, or now (shudder) 8.

We officially support IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari3, and FF3. We're now in the ridiculous position of spending more time testing different versions of IE than we do all the other browsers.

We've already pushed the IE7 compat meta tag out onto all our pages. I think the intended user of that tag is the guy who's never supported anything but IE7. We're hoping that it'll give us an effective support load of "four and a half" browsers, rather than five.

Have you tried http://tinyurl.com/dgaj2u ? It's my favorite tool!

The release of IE8 all about embracing open standards (CSS 2.1, most of HTML 4, parts of HTML 5, major parts of ECMAScript 3.1). How is Microsoft supposed to embrace open standards without releasing major upgrades to their products? How can Microsoft start embracing open standards without people complaining about too many versions of their software?

I don't know the specifics, but there's no point in embracing an open standard if you just run hopscotch through the spec, picking and choosing what you'll implement.

No browser implements 100% of any of those specs. Some of those standards aren't even (close to) finished.

In my dreams? They'd do it the same way Apple did when they released Safari. "Here's our new official browser. It's not like any of the existing Mac browsers [1], but it's based on an open-source rendering engine and Steve Jobs likes it."

But, yeah, yeah, I hear you. That's a fantasy. Microsoft and their customers just do not work that way.

And my ire is indeed misplaced: Of Microsoft's three current browsers, IE8 is most likely the least of my problems. My problem is with IE6. I welcome anything that will help to further eliminate IE6 from my life, including IE8, Windows 7, and vigilante ninjas who sneak into people's houses at night with Firefox installers and stealthily upgrade their beige boxes.

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[1] Ironically, the best Mac browser of the time was IE.

Not the last nail, but it is a nail.

We can hope. IE6 still makes up about 17% of justin.tv's visits though - there's a long way to go yet.

Indeed, we updated our site and we were unable to get the update working well on IE6. We are now redirecting IE6 users to the old version and on it asking them to upgrade to 7 or 8 if then can.

Now & more recently we are seeing a similar percentage of visitors using IE6 :( Hopefully some of our visitors will click the link to upgrade.

It may impact IE7 more than it does IE6. In fact I believe IE7 usage will fall below IE6 in relatively short order. Those who have not left IE6 are mainly in situations that prohibit them from moving on to IE7/8 without major pain (operating system, intranet applications etc.). As long as these are not remedied by IE8, IE6's share will not drop drastically. It will just continue to decline, perhaps at an increased slope, especially if web devs start leaving IE6 behind as well, but no funeral invitation just yet.

When you say relatively short order, how soon is that? 6 months? A year?

Also, will Microsoft push IE8 out with windows update to XP and vista users?

Distribution of Internet Explorer 8 by Automatic Updates will begin shortly after the final release of the product, which is expected in 2009. Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/updatemanagement/dd365125...

At our company we're building an entirely web-based product that will be used more by businesses than consumers. Early in development we decided to exclude IE6 from the supported browsers list due to the extra development time and associated costs required to make it happen.

I'm all for a simplistic web (I prefer plain-text sites myself) but I think the more sites stop supporting IE6 and instead move towards standards-compliant designs, the sooner IE6 will disappear (and the sooner the big corporations who haven't upgraded will feel the pressure to upgrade).

Considering that Dell is still shipping computers with IE6 installed as the default (My Mini9 arrived 2 days ago, and came with Service Pack 3 and IE6... wtf), we will have to support this beast quite a bit longer... But... I think it is viable now to create marketing sites that support IE6, but web apps that require IE7 or higher.

From what I've heard it's going to be around till the 10 year mark. Basically MS is contractually obligated to support IE6 until 10 years after XP first shipped. Basically when it's shipped as part of an OS, it's required to be supported, and the problem is lots of corporate IT managers won't let it be upgraded.

MS Support for 10 years mean that they will issue patches to critical bugs, exploits and so on for 10 years.

However, IE6's support lifespan will not mean that it gets new CCS, Javascript, HTML 5 or ACID compliance features. IE 8 is the official fix for that. It does not mean that people should use IE6, or that MS will encourage people to use it. It does not mean that IE6 will necessarily will be "around" in the sense of having a significant browser market share. Default browser on a fresh install of XP, yes, unless an "XP reloaded edition" comes out.

The "compatibliity view" feature of IE8 is Microsoft's solution to this problem. Now they can meet their contractual obligations for compatibility with IE7 through IE8 and future versions. They don't have to continue supporting IE7 like they do IE6, because they will eventually be able to put even security bug fixes into IE8 (and later) and require an IE7->IE8 upgrade to get them.

Honestly, if the jump from IE6 to IE7 is too much for some users, the jump from IE6 to IE8 going to be even more frightening. Remember IE7 didn't really fix any IE6 rendering issues, still some (badly designed) websites had issues with the transition. Now that IE8 compliant by default, there's going to be a lot more web content that looks and works slightly differently.

Basically the IE6 user base is upgrade averse as it gets, and a new major revision never cures that. IE6 can only be eradicated by a coordinated desupport effort, and that's a total prisoner's dilemma mess. No one's going to risk their traffic for it.

It seems to me that IE6 is capable of everything that newer browsers are (including new IE's). The problem is that in some cases IE6 requires more or different effort from the content creator to get the same effect as other browsers. I mean, what is something that is just plain impossible to do in IE6 that we will be able to do in Firefox 3.5?

If IE6 has the UI that people accept, and if IE6 has the performance/resource utilization that those people like (compared to modern browers, it is pretty lightweight except on javascript-laden pages), and if IE6 already works for every site that they use, why should they switch? Why should they buy a new computer or more RAM just to run a new browser when their current one works just fine? Why should they download a third-party browser and then have to deal with even more updating and migrating their bookmarks and learning a new UI?

We need to understand that there are going to be a significant number of people running IE6 on Windows XP even a couple of years from now. Nobody has created a compelling reason for them to upgrade and it doesn't seem like it will happen until Microsoft stops issueing security upgrades for those products. Even then, a lot of people won't care if they get security upgrades or not. (I know of a small business that is using a ten-year-old desktop running Windows 98 as their only file server today.)

> Last year, Microsoft began to perk attention in the computer community releasing a beta of Internet Explorer 8, which featured innovative browsing modes like InPrivate, which were quickly copied by its competitors.

Didn't Safari have "Private Browsing" mode long before that?

InPrivate browsing also has features that make it harder for websites like google-analytics.com and googlesyndication.com to track you across multiple websites. I don't think any other browers have a built-in feature that does that yet.

I haven't been following IE 8 as close as I should have been, is there a good way to have both IE 7 and IE 8 at the same time? (Well it doesn't even have to be at the same time, but such that I can quit one and open the other.) Maybe compatibility mode is good enough?

Kind of-sort of: http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

Thanks for posting this. I'm curious to see if this is the final straw or not as well. Personally, I may install it but it'll only be briefly.

good luck with the uninstalling part.

Noon where? Does that somehow go without saying?

Perhaps noon local time.

my local time?

9am PST. Noon EST.

I just installed it, and had to reinstall Chrome because it stopped working once IE8 installed. Great work Microsoft!

Seriously, if just a few advertisers said that they'd start using AdCenter, they could get Microsoft to fix IE.

More PITA. Now you'll have to test your webapp againt another sucky browser.

Quite frankly, does anyone actually care anymore?

If you do any kind of web development you should definitely care...

The improved functionality in IE8 + IE Developer Tools (ToolBar) is impressive. Getting much closer to FireBug features and usability now.

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