A Look At Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
I realize Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has been reviewed on several locations on the net. However, I would not be doing our loyal reader's justice without expressing our take on the new browser. So, wanna hear it? Here it go!
Installation:
**Keep in mind this is my experience on my work machine running XP Pro SP2, depending on your configuration and OS results may vary**
I thought installation would be pretty straight forward. The UI for installation looks exactly like IE 7 which should be familiar. Of course Microsoft makes you update various updates just to install IE 8 even though you may not want to install them. I tried to uncheck the Install updates box and Microsoft insists on protecting myself from myself. Well … I can always remove what I don't like so … I will continue on.
Uh Oh! If you have Firefox set as your default browser (which I encourage most users to do) IE 8 doesn't like it! Ok … perhaps installation is not as straight forward as I anticipated.
So, I launched IE 7 and made it my default browser. Which is easy enough but unnecessary in my opinion. Tools \ Internet Options \ Programs \ Make Default.
Well, I had to start the install process all over again just so Microsoft could point me to the wonderful Validation Required page! This update indicates an issue where the language bar crashes on multi-core machines. The machine I am on now is a single core CPU and I already disabled the language bar … but thanks for having my back MS!!!
After all of the validation and downloading the update I get to do another restart! Whooohooo!
Ok, after the restart I get to start the installation process all over AGAIN. Seems to be working … I hope.
Success! Oh … but wait … Another Reboot! Microsoft sure knows how to show me their WOW!
After the Restart it looks like I am finally ready to configure IE 8. I never let Microsoft choose my settings so I am selecting to choose them myself.
On the next screen I am asked about a search provider. Well, Google is currently set up as my current provider, but since this is a review I want to check out what IE 8 is going to offer so I chose a list of other providers.
Next … again as I am curious as to what IE 8 will offer I am selecting to choose a list of activity providers versus the standards.
It appears the initial set up is complete … I will leave the safety monitor on which is enabled by default. If it blocks any legitimate sites you can always add it to Trusted Sites.
Ok … since I wanted to see additional search sites IE 8 popped up the options page which include the usual Web Search engines and a list of various Topic Search sites. There is also still a field to create your own as well.
And here is the list of Activity Providers to add to IE 8.
Here is a look at the IE 8 Beta 1 default user interface. The appearance is quite similar to IE 7 … from my understanding the major changes are not in the looks but the code and security under the hood. I will be covering more of IE 8 Beta 1 in the next coming days.
If you are so inclined to start playing with the new browser it is available for download now.
tried to twitter these to you but realise you don't follow me
http://twitter.com/buildmaster
shouldn't "I tired to uncheck" be "I tried to uncheck"?
I had firefox beta 3 as my primary browser and it didn't complain, maybe to do with Vista or Updated already. who knows
I hope you switched your default browser back to Firefox.
@ Steve Wheatley …. OF COURSE! LOL!
I found it funny that IE8 beta 1 has trouble installing on XP SP3 rc1. I've been running the XP beta for a long while and totally forgot that I had it installed. When trying to install IE8 it would say that I was missing a patch. Trying to install that patch stated that I was already running a newer version.
I emailed the ie8 team, which responded very, very quickly (under 30min) and were very helpful. You have to be running the latest version of XP sp3. This did not help me, I was already running this version. Finally I decided to uninstall XP SP3 and then install IE8. This step worked and I was able to reinstall XP SP3 rc1 after IE8 without any issue.
The real tip here, don't play with test software unless you have time to troubleshoot it.
I did it and I want to uninstall it. It doesn't like my gmail
Thanks mysticgeek. Firefox always be the first choice
wow .. i installed Firefox Beta 4 without one single issue .. works on all my machines regardless of all these crazy patchs , i will NEVER install ie8 , but that thanx for the tour :]
I had Vista RC1 and it would not install with it but I waited until SP1 came out and installed SP1 and then installed IE8 in which then my web quit working completely. It was the winsock files that were corrupted. IE8 is real good to me. I hate firefox.
Install went much more smoothly than you describe for me on Vista. (Yes, SP1 was already installed.) I didn't have to make IE the default browser and only had to reboot once.
(On a side note, one reboot is just about the minimum you can really hope for with any significant update on Windows, since NTFS doesn't really have inodes in the traditional sense. This is the same reason you can't easily make a backup copy of a file while it's open for writing. Personally I'd like to see a true versioned filesystem, like in VMS, which if done right would solve this issue for free in addition to the more obvious benefits.)
I don't particularly like the UI, but as you say that's not very different from IE7.
Haven't had a chance to put it through the paces on page rendering yet. I gave it the once-over on our main website here, and it's fine on that, but that was designed to render well on Gecko, Opera, and IE7, and mostly-okay on IE6 (if you ignore some odd image backgrounds — I was not willing to put off using the alpha channel any longer), so no big surprise that IE8 does fine there. What I really want to know is, how will it do on sites that have not already been tested on and tweaked for IE6 or IE7? But I haven't had time to investigate that yet.
@ Jonadab … Yeah, I am not sure why I had so many issues with installing it on XP. I am going to install it on Vista as well … and we will see what happens!