George P. Alexander Jr. (Software Engineer) posted 10/28/2008 | Comments (2)
So after a not-so-happy time with IE 8 Beta, I've uninstalled it and have IE7 back on my desktop. Two simple reasons why I use Internet Explorer is because 1. most corporate websites and web applications render right only under IE and 2. Web applications I develop for some of these corporations have a requirement that they should work right in IE first and any other browser is secondary.
A vicious cycle I guess.
I do think that IE8 is pretty neat and I did like it a lot. One new feature is a "web slice" and I didn't find it very amusing. When it comes to speed, I'm pretty happy with Firefox and Chrome. From a developer's perspective however, there certainly were a few things to note that would make you think twice before wanting to uninstall.
So after a not-so-happy time with IE 8 Beta, I've uninstalled it and have IE7 back on my desktop. Two simple reasons why I use Internet Explorer is because 1. most corporate websites and web applications render right only under IE and 2. Web applications I develop for some of these corporations have a requirement that they should work right in IE first and any other browser is secondary.
A vicious cycle I guess.
I do think that IE8 is pretty neat and I did like it a lot. One new feature is a "web slice" and I didn't find it very amusing. When it comes to speed, I'm pretty happy with Firefox and Chrome. From a developer's perspective however, there certainly were a few things to note that would make you think twice before wanting to uninstall.
The built-in IE8 debugger tools for HTML, Javascript and CSS is pretty neat. You just can't miss the profiler for scrolling through functions easily, inferring script performance by knowing the total number of calls to a function, time spent on it, tools for graph reporting and data exporting etc. Before you had to down the IE developer toolbar to get some cool developer support but now you get all that built-in so you kind'a get that Firefox developer feel when using it (Remember when developers always loved Firefox over Internet Explorer?). It is also more error friendly than previous IE versions when reporting errors from external script files. Before, when script debugging was disabled and you enabled errors to be notified, the source of the error was usually a pain to find out since it was in most cases, always not right. Hence, you had to enable script debugging and this would cascade to all your browser sessions. Any open browser session that had regular or irregular auto-refreshes or an Ajax call (like Google homepage) with a script error would instantly pop-up with a debug prompt. This is really irritating if you've been through it a couple of times. But now this seems to be fixed with IE8. So no need to enable debugging anymore to pinpoint the source of error. Besides, I hated script debugger or having an external applications to debug my web applications as loading these external applications took an extra load of time and since debugging is something you do so frequently, it just sucks have to go through the same routine frequently.
IE8 is also CSS 2.1 and standards compliant while CSS extensions that were added from IE5 onwards have been fully depreciated to protect against browser based attacks. So no more "IE is so insecure" at least on that basis.
One small development enhancement to the XMLHttpRequest object was the inclusion of a timeout property so as to handle requests that needed to get canceled if they were unresponsive. Major add-ons were APIs for cross domain security that enable you to use toStaticHTML and toJSON for sanitizing. JSON support is now native.
These are just some of the reasons why a developer would like IE8 especially if you're a .Net developer who has to develop for IE. But what mainly caused me to uninstall the upgrade was the same old problem - frequent crashes aka instability. After installing IE 8 Beta, I noticed that uncompressing zip files to any other location except the current folder would cause Windows Explorer to crash. On the same note, one IE 8 beta session crash closes all my IE browser windows (this is true for IE7 too though so I still can't figure out the root cause. But I think the chances of this happening in IE7 is much less). I hate that especially since I'm the kind'a guy who has at the least, a minimum of 10 browser windows open. Even though I use Firefox heavily more than Chrome and IE, I need IE open for the sake of few corporate websites and also for application development.
But all these crashes started getting a bit irritating after sometime so I eventually decided to uninstall the update to IE8. I thought the crashes were somehow related but after uninstalling, I still have my Windows Explorer crashing when uncompressing files to other locations. I don't know if the IE8 upgrade did something that messed Windows Explorer from uncompressing things right. There's no specific error code I can refer too either.
One browser's loss is another browser's gain: I just installed the latest trunk from Firefox Minefield after reading a lot of reviews about it. The browsers keep coming but you'll probably need to weed out the hype from reality...
IE8 Beta 2 is great... but I'll put it on hold till it stabilizes a bit more.
Time to call it a day,
Until next time,
God bless!
IE8 is also CSS 2.1 and standards compliant while CSS extensions that were added from IE5 onwards have been fully depreciated to protect against browser based attacks. So no more "IE is so insecure" at least on that basis.
One small development enhancement to the XMLHttpRequest object was the inclusion of a timeout property so as to handle requests that needed to get canceled if they were unresponsive. Major add-ons were APIs for cross domain security that enable you to use toStaticHTML and toJSON for sanitizing. JSON support is now native.
These are just some of the reasons why a developer would like IE8 especially if you're a .Net developer who has to develop for IE. But what mainly caused me to uninstall the upgrade was the same old problem - frequent crashes aka instability. After installing IE 8 Beta, I noticed that uncompressing zip files to any other location except the current folder would cause Windows Explorer to crash. On the same note, one IE 8 beta session crash closes all my IE browser windows (this is true for IE7 too though so I still can't figure out the root cause. But I think the chances of this happening in IE7 is much less). I hate that especially since I'm the kind'a guy who has at the least, a minimum of 10 browser windows open. Even though I use Firefox heavily more than Chrome and IE, I need IE open for the sake of few corporate websites and also for application development.
But all these crashes started getting a bit irritating after sometime so I eventually decided to uninstall the update to IE8. I thought the crashes were somehow related but after uninstalling, I still have my Windows Explorer crashing when uncompressing files to other locations. I don't know if the IE8 upgrade did something that messed Windows Explorer from uncompressing things right. There's no specific error code I can refer too either.
One browser's loss is another browser's gain: I just installed the latest trunk from Firefox Minefield after reading a lot of reviews about it. The browsers keep coming but you'll probably need to weed out the hype from reality...
IE8 Beta 2 is great... but I'll put it on hold till it stabilizes a bit more.
Time to call it a day,
Until next time,
God bless!
No comments:
Post a Comment