Posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 3:04pm by Rob Wilkerson
I spent last Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo in New York and, though I was disappointed in the show as a whole, I did go to one interesting session. I went to see Pete LePage, an Internet Explorer product manager, speak about Internet Explorer 8. Though I’ve long since given up on IE as my primary browser (even before moving away from Windows as anything more than an occasional-use operating system), it’s still an animal that I have to deal with as part of my daily life and I was looking forward to hearing about what to expect in the next version.
The presentation didn’t disappoint. Pete did a nice job of presenting a lot of features in very limited time and I found myself surprised, pleased and impressed at the effort the team has made to catch up in some areas and to innovate in others. I have to admit that I liked what I saw and, being a trained professional, I was looking forward to trying it at home. Today I finally got around to doing so and I wanted to write about my impressions.
I have none. In spite of all of the good things that IE 8 seems to offer, it still doesn’t offer the ability to install alongside IE 7. Full stop.
That’s it. That’s the only impression I have. I still need to access IE 7 on a regular basis for testing and I don’t have (or want) 12 separate licenses for Windows XP on which to test each browser version. IE 8 has to go. If it’s worth mentioning, maybe I’ll provide my impressions of the uninstall process. But I doubt it.
internet explorer, annoyances, browsers, windows
Posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 9:23am by Rob Wilkerson
This is what Microsoft has done to their browser market (at least my little corner of that market) by letting it stagnate for so long between IE6 and IE7. I simply don’t care. I moved on.
Back in the day IE6 (and IE5 before that) really was the best browser on the market. Once I moved to Firefox for my day-to-day browsing and development needs, IE became nothing more than a nuisance application that I have to open from time to time for testing purposes.
As I’ve mentioned in several blog comments over the last few days, the ugly fact is that I don’t have to care about IE vNext until my clients start caring about IE vNext. So I don’t.
It wasn’t always that way.
internet explorer
Posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 6:40pm by Rob Wilkerson
A while back, I committed to “paper” my thoughts on the proposal to support IE7-style standards in IE8 by default. The plan was to do so by rendering in IE7 mode unless web developers added a new meta tag to their content that would force the use of IE8’s standards-compliant rendering mode.
My take was simply this: I’m okay with multiple rendering modes and I’m okay with the introduction of a new tag to support the explicit specification of the desired rendering mode, but I thought the implementation of those modes should be reversed. Do whatever you think you have to do, but default to progressing the web and rendering in standards mode.
The IE team probably read my opinion (yeah, right) because they reversed their earlier decision. I certainly didn’t expect it, but I applaud the decision. I think it’s the right thing to do and I think the IE team deserves props for listening to the community and reconsidering – even though they may get crucified for that reversal simply because they’re Microsoft.
standards, internet explorer
