Friday, March 20, 2009

IE8 released

If you haven't seen the news by now, here's your quick heads-up that IE8 is now officially released. The news was part of the Day 2 keynote here at MIX09, but it was largely expected (and even predicted on this blog). The official release wraps-up a much longer than expected development cycle for the follow-up browser to the headache-inducing IE7. In fact, it was exactly a year ago, at MIX08, where I originally blogged about IE8 beta 1, so it has taken a full year to go from Beta 1 to RTW! Regardless, the process is done now and IE8 is official. If you've forgotten what's new in IE8, here's a quick overview of the major changes from IE7:

  • Big performance improvements in JS processing, page rendering, chrome speed
  • Many chrome changes (new address bar, Web Slices, Accelerators, etc.)
  • Security improvements ("InPrivate" browsing mode)
  • Big steps forward in standards support:
    • "Most" CSS 2.1 compliant browser
    • Beginning of HTML 5 implementation (XDR, local storage, etc.)
    • Passes ACID2
  • Compatibility mode for "headache-less" upgrades
Enjoy the final release and begin testing your sites today (if you haven't started yet). Telerik, of course, will deliver official support for IE8 RTW for all of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX no later than Q1 2009 SP1. All controls are already largely compatible, but any lingering issues will be fixed for the upcoming service pack. If you do have trouble today, simply use the IE8 Compatibility Meta Tag to temporarily solve your problems. Download IE8 RTW from Microsoft today

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, it's also the browser that is least compliant with the Acid3 test... 20/100 when Webkit is scoring close to 90/100 and Opera is claiming 100/100.

Obviously, some of that is MS's reluctance to implement ahead of the CSS3 standards, but a lot of it is not.

Whether or not this is significant for rendering is debatable, but the bad PR is going to cost MS.

Todd Anglin said...

@Anon- Not a bad point. IE8 is definitely not looking good in ACID3, but I'm not sure that matters...yet. You've got to admit that it's a huge step forward to have all major browsers pass ACID2 (FF3, Safari, Opera, IE8). Hopefully we'll have ACID3 support for the next round!

-Todd