My thoughts on IE 8

Gentlemen,

Firstly I'd like to say 'well done' with the blog. I think it's a great idea and hopfully will help us all. My only qualm is with the name, seems like John forgot to include Brasil in the title. Oh well!

I think I was the first (if not only) one of us to install IE 8. I'm pretty sure I was the first one to uninstall it as well. John asked me to provide a little feedback, so here goes:

The installation was painless and everything went according to plan. Visually, for the user, there is little difference in the appearance of the browser itself. The biggest change is that is seems to render pages like the other browsers (Chrome, Opera and Firefox). Hopefully this will alleviate, if not end, the nightmare of having to create separate style sheets for IE. There is a cute little button to the right of the address bar that allows IE 8 to diaplay a page as if it were an older version of IE - this is interesting for designers and programmers.

IE 8 is still in beta and so is not being widely used yet, but we should be prepared to make our pages readable in all versions. The easiest way to do this (so far) is to force the new browser to view the page as if it were the old browser. This is accomplished by adding a single line of code to the header of each page:
<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"> .
This code forces the browser to use the rendering engine of IE7.

So far the reviews of the new browser has been mostly positive, but there have also been a few detractors (if you have MS then you won't like IE8 - no matter how good it is).

Here are a few links to more infomation:
WIKI PAGE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8
Official Page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx
Microsoft Developer Network Page about how the new browser works with CSS:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531205(vs.85).aspx (very good - recemmended!!!)

If you're wondering why I uninstalled it so quickly...
I has to do with an online banking program that I use that didn't work with the new browser version. I couldn't figure out how to run versions 7 and 8 at the same time so I ended up uninstalling 8 so that I could access my bank account again. As soon as my bank creates a program that is compatible with IE 8, I plan to upgrade again. I liked the new browser very much.

FYI I'm running Windows Vista Home Basic on an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3 Ghz with 4 GB of memory.

That's all for me for this week. I won't be able to attend the meeting this week as I will be traveling.

Have a great Meeting!!!