Internet Explorer 8: Does Not Suck

So I downloaded the IE8 beta 1 last night. It’s not bad. Seems pretty promising, in fact, although a couple of the new features are less than intuitive at first glance. As a disclaimer, Microsoft is pretty clear that this beta is aimed at “designers and developers,” so I’m sure there will be a bunch of usability improvements before the next release. With that said, some first impressions:

• It overwrites your IE7 installation. Not a big deal, and it does include a giant “Emulate IE7″ button in the toolbar that (supposedly) will let you test and surf 2006-style.
• The default page is AOL’s homepage, which ironically loads with all kinds of screwed-up CSS rendering.
• General interface seems to be about the same as IE7.
• Web Slices look interesting. Basically, when you are designing a page, you designate a particular area with a specific div id and class. When people visit the page, they can take the area you’ve designated and save it to their toolbar, where it functions like an RSS feed. Web slices can be set to have expiration dates, so they won’t hang around when they’re no longer needed (imagine you have a web slice containing information on an upcoming event). Get more details from Microsoft.
• Automatic Crash Recovery. Finally. Obviously, Firefox has had this for some time now.
• Developer Tools. The button bar on the right side of the screen contains a “developer tools” button that opens up a small window with some interesting visual ways of dissecting HTML and CSS (like drawing highlight bars around only relatively positioned divs, for instance), although I still prefer the all-in-one-window method of the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Nonetheless, I like it.

Not too bad, all in all. I did have a hard time figuring out how to use the web slices, however. It’s easy to “get” a slice–there’s a link on the IE8 homepage to a slice from MSNBC, but it’s hard to figure out how to use it–the slices are not displayed with the RSS feeds. Like I said earlier, there’s going to be a lot more finalizing done, I’m sure. It is a cool idea, though, and whether or not it becomes popular, it’s an indication of where the Internet is going: small bits of exactly what you want delivered straight to your lap. Eventually, you won’t even have to visit websites at all. Crap. I’m going back to bagging groceries, aren’t I.

Download IE8 Beta from Microsoft.