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Using Betas (or how I ended up with no browser)

I like trying new software, so I usually install and try all betas I find interesting. Thus I’ve downloaded and installed IE8, without no second thoughts, as soon as it was announced at this year’s Mix conference.

What I haven’t thought was that since I had previously installed Safari beta 3 and Firefox 3 beta 3 I would end up not having an RTM browser installed on my machine. And although all of them seem to work in general, they all do have a few bugs and quirks that make me switch from one to another just to access a particular site :-(.

Some of the IE8 problems I have identified so far are:

  • Popups won’t show, although a new IE process is spawned when I click the corresponding link. No error message is displayed.
  • When I open a new tab and type a new URL on the address bar, the site opens on yet another new tab leaving the one I’ve started blank.
  • Rendering issues. Even with the Emulate IE7 mode enabled I still don’t have the rendering I had with IE7.
  • Crashing issues. Occasionally the browser crashes, leaving the process running though.

ActivitiesEven so, I really love the work IE team made for IE8 with the Activities, the Web Slices, the speed, standards compliance and developer tools that they introduced and I’m pretty excited that I’m able to start experimenting and developing for IE8. I really look forward for the next public release ;-).

Still I wouldn’t recommend installing it (that is if you’re not immediately involved to web development) just yet, as there are issues that may cause you problems.

Published inInternet ExplorerWeb

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