stephenwoods.net

I have been playing with IE8 tonight. And I have to say that I am very impressed with what microsoft has done. They seem to be serious about a standards compliant browser this time (bugs not withstanding, but its beta 1, so they get a pass).

They fixed the 2 domain thing, and added some cool features that I hope other browsers pick up soon (XDR: cross domain request!). Better browser history control, and actually best of all they added two new features that the old microsoft would have crippled: Slices and activities. Slices allows developers to add modules that can be pulled off (a bit like dashboard), except the slices are defined by the developer. The bad old microsoft would have made this some horrid non-standard thing that required active x. The new, kinder MS has decided to go with a MICROFORMAT. A completely standards compliant microformat. The kind of microformat anyone will be able to parse. If I felt like it I could probably whip up support for webslices in firefox tonight, its that simple. And it won’t break on other browsers because its just done with html classnames.

Well done Microsoft, I hope this is a sign of things to come. (but silverlight? really? come on!)

After reading the article on ala about IE8 I have to say I think that despite their insistence that the  IE=edge flag should not generally be used I think it is the solution for most developers. If you code to the standard you shouldn’t cripple your site by targeting an obsolete browser. The whole point of web standards is that a new browser, if it follows the standard, will not break your layout.

However, I don’t think the meta tag is a necessarily bad idea. I think most developers working on consumer-facing apps should avoid it. But there is a good reason to use it: intranets and other custom web applications. These are apps that are business critical, but delivered in an environment where IT can make requirements so that users can access internal apps. Providing a way of targeting a specific browser version makes sure that those apps don’t break when users upgrade their browsers.

I would hope that this will actually encourage more IT departments to speed deployment of IE8 if they can be sure it won’t break access to mission critical internal tools. This is great for us, the developers of the consumer web, because we can target our apps to the standard without fear of users stuck in ancient browsers just so they can use Peoplesoft.