First, the thing you’re all waiting for, the Flickr photoset. Of course, if you don’t know yet, the browser is available for download on Microsoft’s site.
So, how does IE8 play with some of the players out there? Well, not really good… Acid2 is correct, by all means, and congrats to the IE team to have a perfect rendering of that big, yellow smiley, we all already hate.
But Acid3 is a different story. First, you get a security information and have to accept the XML parser to run on the page. When you do…
Not really good. This is only a bit better than Internet Explorer 7 got on that test.
But the real problem with the new rendering model is… That it’s too precise. It looks likethe IE team just followed the standards correctly, but ignored the current, existing websites. Because of that, almost every website you can think of will have some rendering issues, such as Yahoo!, Adobe or YouTube:
What about the good stuff?
Well, the new developer tool is a gift from the Heavens. It’s just like Firebug - only uglier.
Now, I didn’t have a chance to test the new Web Slices feature, but the Activities are there, and you could compare them to the BlueOrganizer extension from Firefox. They allow you to search for info, blog the highlighted text, translate it, and some other things:
That’s it for now. IE8 doesn’t seem to be what we all were waiting for, but only time will tell how will actually developing sites for the new browser work out. If you care to read more reviews, Joe Walker has a scoop on the 6 connection limit, which will probably help us developing Comet applications.
PS. Gmail loaded quickly enough, just like in IE7. So no bad stuff to say about it. Next up, JavaScript benchmarks!