With Internet Explorer 8 on the horizon I thought I might take a look at Microsoft’s recently released Beta 2 version of their flagship browser.

To give you a quick primer, IE8 is MS’s most standards compliant web browser to date, but that comes at a cost. You see, designers like myself and others who adhere to strict web standards have had to take it upon themselves to allow for Internet Explorers’ dreadful web standards support, by utilising what we call ‘IE Hacks’, typically in the form of a conditional comment to specifically ‘fix’ issues in IE6 and IE7. It’s the bane of our existence, but even with the imminent launch of IE8 things might not get much better.

For our non-web developer audience, the conditional comment I mentioned is in lamens terms:

If the browser is IE6, then include the IE6 styelsheet
and...
If the browser is IE7, then include the IE7 styelsheet

So for all other browsers, you know, the ones that actually have good support for web standards, the conditional comments are ignored and the site you are viewing (like this one) will use the primary style sheet.

And when IE8 is released, existing web sites will also use the main style sheet because there is no conditional comment to say otherwise, so you can see the potential problem. Basically it means if IE8 isn’t the web standards friendly browser Microsoft says it is, web developers are back to square one.

Microsoft combats this with a feature they have unimaginatively called ‘compatibility view’. The premise being that when you come across a site that doesn’t quite look right (or looks like a total mess) you can add it to your compatibility view list and IE will switch to an older rendering engine. It’s not a nice way to manage your sites but Microsoft had no choice, for without this ugly work-around they would cop too much flak over the myriad of sites that will break or look odd in IE8. At least now they can just say “Oh you have to manage that with the compatibility view” and put the onus on the users to make it work for themselves.

With this in mind I think it’s time to check out a few popular web sites (and this one!) in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, as it’s as close to the final build of the engine as it’s going to get short of a release candidate.

To give it the best chance for testing I used a fresh install of Windows XP Pro (fully patched) and the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2.

Facebook

are committed to totally ignoring web standards. That said, I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary except on one occasion where my profile page rendered everything normally white as blue and vice versa. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t get the problem to re-appear though, and I am willing to put that down to my Virtual Box.  There have been many reports of Facebook not working properly in IE8, but I did not experience anything apart from that graphics anomaly.

Digg

was looking fine until I noticed something peculiar. Hitting any link on the front page resulted in the story being opened in a new window. Adding the site to my compatibility view list did not remedy the problem as I had expected. This made for some extremely painful navigating on Digg, if you can just imagine having clicked on about 8 links means you have 9 instances of Internet Explorer open, something we haven’t had to do since before tabbed browsing was introduced years ago. You can bet this is something the Digg developers will have to address, assuming it’s just not an IE bug.

Another annoyance, one I think is major, is that I was logged out of Digg when switching to compatibility view, and again when leaving compatibility view. Why Microsoft chose to kill the session in that manner is anyone’s guess, but maybe it will be fixed on the final release.

Apart from those particular annoyances, Digg looked fine.

ABC (Australia)

Arguably one of the best presented and most user-friendly news sites I’ve seen (and the only web standards compliant news site I've seen), I was expecting a few problems with the ABC web site. Mainly because as a developer I know that sometimes a great deal of complexity happens behind the scenes to make something appear simple to users. But my guess was wrong, and the ABC web site functioned and looked exactly as expected.

StumbleUpon

No problems noticed on StumbleUpon, and the SU Toolbar even installed without a hitch. But stumbling a few random sites did cause IE8 to crash. That’s not SU’s fault though.

Youtube

No problems encountered on , and installing the flash player plug-in was painless.

Rusty Lime

Everything’s cool in the gang on Rusty Lime, and I was pleasantly surprised to see my

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tags render as they I intended, completely ignoring the ugly substitutes I had to make for IE6 and IE7. Our CMS did show a few anomalies but nothing critical to the functionality.

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Tentative Conclusion

After 8 versions of Internet Explorer, it looks like Microsoft are finally on the way to getting the rendering right. It’s not perfect but it’s easily their most significant step in the right direction, and that can't be a bad thing.

As far as using it as an everyday browser goes, it’s certainly OK for some people but I need more, and would never in a billion years seriously consider using Internet Explorer as my full time browser. As I and other Firefox users already know, IE is still a giant step light years behind in terms of features and customisation.

But for web developers, there may be light at the end of the tunnel - Maybe. I will reserve judgement for that once IE8 has been out in the wild for a significant time.

I will try these sites again on RC1 when it's released. Stay tuned.