I ran across the link How do I make my site ‘light up’ with Internet Explorer 8? on Anne Van Kesterens blog today and I must say that IE8 is really shaping up to be pretty a useful browser.
Microformats, huh, who knew?, although it is not a specification or even a draft it really is a step in the right direction.
And before you start bitching about the Activities Provider stuff you must remember that Mozilla has a lot of the same kind of stuff built in as well.
As long as developers remember to be unobtrusive these things are not going to be an issue, it’s up to us!!
- Activities Providers: Basically the same as when you select a search engine in Firefox and right click and select “Search [provider] for [selection]”
- WebSlices: doesn’t quite get it but I probably will when the first public beta hits the shelves.
- CSS 2.1 Compliance: Well, call me jaded but, we’ll see. The tests seems to work in Firefox so I hope it is the same for IE8. But as the above mentioned page says: “The W3C CSS working group has made great strides towards converging on a final specification for CSS 2.1. At the time of this writing, the specification is in ‘Candidate Recommendation’.”. The part I am thinking about is “Candidate Recommendation”, meaning it’s not even finished and developers are ready for CSS3 already. It’s a little bit pathetic.
- Data URI’s are cool, saves the browser a trip to the server at least. Optimization friendly.
- Printing Improvements: This is a major disappointment in all browsers …
And then they get to the cause of such debate lately: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7”> and sure, why not, it makes it real easy for developers to fix intrawebs and customer webs in a flash and still get the browser out onto the market. That’s all I will say on the matter, unless the change their mind again.
- DOM Storage: Just like Mozzy does it
- DOM Core Improvements: the examples shows an open mind … nice
- Selectors: me like
I’m not quite sure what Anne is talking about when he says “Disappointed with the seemlingly proprietary extensions, never proposed in the relevant W3C Working Groups”. The only thing I can imagine is the HTC and COM part of the “Improved Namespace Support” section but those things does not seem any different than when Mozilla uses XUL-behaviors.
That’s it for me, looking forward to IE8. Although I will always love Firefox (Firebird … Phoenix … it’s been with me for so long) ♥