IE8: What’s After Beta 2

Compatibility List FAQ

IEBlog — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:30:13 GMT

A few weeks back, we announced Compatibility View improvements available in the Release Candidate build

IE8 XDomainRequest

Pietro Brambati Blog — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:38:46 GMT

Durante la presentazione che feci ai MS Days 08 su IE8, ho brevemente accennato ad alcune API che possono

Completing Access Control support for XDomainRequest

IEBlog — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:18:10 GMT

Back in October , Sunava described changes that we made to the XDomainRequest (XDR) object in IE8 between

IE8 in Windows 7 Beta

Bink.nu — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:39:36 GMT

Paul Cutsinger,Principal Lead Program Manager has posted about IE8 in Windows 7 Beta in the IE Team's

Next Internet Explorer 8 Preview Improves Compatability View

US ISV Developer Evangelism Team — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:48:43 GMT

The next public update of Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users

re: IE8: What’s After Beta 2

larry — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:43:56 GMT

@hAl re:"Most are already solved in IE8"

You must have a special version of IE8Beta2 that we don't have. The version I have is still very beta and is no where near ready for release based on lack of fixed for old IE6/IE7 issues as well as IE8 regressions)

I don't care how long IE8 takes to ship, I just hope that the Q1 - 2009 RC1 is considerably fixed up in terms of rendering, JS bug fixes, and UI improvments/fixes.

If the RC1 is only mildly better than Beta 2 then we are in for lots of trouble.

We have a status for our clients regarding supported browsers and their stability. Currently IE8Beta2 is reading 61% stable and has a 3% recommendation for users to upgrade. We will be updating when the RC1 comes out but until the "recommended" flag hits 85%, none of our users will be upgrading.

we might update before the release if information about fixes to Beta2 are released before the RC.

re: IE8: What’s After Beta 2

hAl — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:57:03 GMT

@Dave

Why would anyone look at IE7 rendering issues fir the IE8 betas ?

Most of those are already solved in IE8.

re: IE8: What’s After Beta 2

Stifu — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:28:06 GMT

Dave: rendering bug fixes in weekly updates would be a bad thing, IMO. No other browser vendor does that, either.

It'd be bad because not all users update their system, and you'd then have a wide variety of IE8. It'd be nearly impossible to serve them all working pages...

IE6 and 7 are quite buggy, indeed, but at least they're all the same everywhere, and you know how they behave.

re: IE8: What’s After Beta 2

Mitch 74 — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:47:58 GMT

@EricLaw: sorry, you obviously took my comment as being reproachful - it actually wasn't, it was a suggestion.

I was thinking something could be made inside IE that would cumulate Mozilla's method of downloading, installing and loading Netscape plugins (like Flash is being dealt with currently) which means: prompt, one-click download, license display, install (or update): there, it's active on the page.

In short, if canvas, SVG, whatever can't be supported right inside IE's source code trunk, it could be done in independent code repositories, under a different license (which would allow code reuse, as there are enough free SVG parsers and renderers in existence); I'm just not sure embedding these in ActiveX controls is the best solution, although IE8's better thread, memory and authorization management may actually make it work.

Helping it along inside IE would be adding the installation source's security signature part of the IE list of pre-approved certificates (that would remove quite a few security prompts: "IE blocked some content from this page" => allow, page reloads, "Is this plugin's origin valid?" => yes, "Are you sure you want to install?" => Yes, "the plugin is signed by ImtheMaker" => Allow, then license, install, refresh - note the extras); the IE team would need to negotiate with existing projects to start said IE branches...

This may be the way to provide much asked for functionality, without having to write everything from scratch and without forcing users to jump through hoops.

I would guess that for now SVG support is waiting for proper XML support within IE (SVG being XML, I bet you guys are thinking about using msxml6 or later as the parser, and then extend the VML renderer to make it cover SVG too; you could do that, but then you'd need to fix VML first, judging from other comments).

Which would create a different SVG engine, which you (the IE team) would have to maintain, and get flak on because:

- (external) it wouldn't match other existing engines;

- (external) bugs wouldn't be fixed for years;

- (internal) it could be used by MS Office if it ever supported SVG instead of (explicitly deprecated by MS Office team in writing the ECMA OXML proposal) VML (say, in ODF 1.2), but the Silverlight team would have a problem with it.

What say you?

Heck, you could simply have a contract with the Mozilla Foundation, or with Opera Software, or with Apple (easier as it's already the case for Flash) to develop an IE version of their existing browser's SVG Tiny modules, with the same terms the MS Office team gave CleverAge - for business peace of mind.

There's this pesky Acid3 thingy, too.

re: IE8: What’s After Beta 2

Dave — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:41:02 GMT

Obviously the final release for IE8 will still have *some* issues outstanding - many will indeed be discovered after release.

What I'd *really* love to see, in addition to MS fixing the security bugs that are discovered, they also fix rendering bugs with any weekly updates.

The number of outstanding rendering bugs for IE7 is colossal (172 listed on http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs), so PLEASE Microsoft don't make us wait until yet another version is written before any IE8 rendering bugs are addressed!