Thursday, January 29th 2009

A few thoughts on IE8 RC 1

I have just downloaded and installed the upgrade from Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 to release candidate 1.

The installation required restarting the computer twice. The second time Windows didn’t get further than the welcome screen, so I had to restart a third time.

Some thoughts about IE8 RC 1 then:

• It definitely feels faster than beta 2. It seems load quite a bit faster and new tabs open faster too. My installation of Firefox doesn’t start up as quickly (which might have something to do with the 14 extensions + 1 theme I use), but it opens tabs much faster. Instantly even.
• The IE team claim full compatibility with CSS 2.1. That’s great news and a huge leap forward for the IE rendering engine. Web designers will still miss some of the CSS 3 goodies that Firefox and Safari have put out recently though. Rounded borders and transparent colours come to mind.
• Internet Explorer 8 has quite a few new features that I covered in my review of beta 2. But not much seems to have happened in the way of features for RC 1.
• JavaScript performance seems to have improved quite a bit from beta 2. Firefox 3.1 beta 2 runs the Sunspider benchmark more than four times as quickly though.

To sum up: Nice improvements made by the IE team, but it’s a shame for web designers that we still won’t be able to use rounded borders and semi-transparent colours.

Posted at 10:04. Categories: browsers, Internet Explorer. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

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