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You'd have to wait for those drafts in CSS3 that acid3 tests to go final before the IE team will support them fully imo.

I don't see why they'd just on something that very well could change by the time it gets finalized into a standard.

Acid3 tests things which some people think are nice but are not offical. People asking for Acid3 complience are actually asking for trouble in the future.

There are no "Standards" only recommendations. Why do people always get this wrong?

Call it what you will, my point is that the "recommendations" as you put it aren't in a finalized form that every browser maker can agree on and use.

Lots of these acid3 parts are often if not always handled different in the other browsers like FF, opera and safari. It's my understanding that none of the said browsers that score good on Acid 3 handle or look at (w/e you wanna call it) the code the same way.

and that will make the browser better how?

They are not recommendations. It's a draft for net standards.

The problem is you have a bunch of wannabe page designers screaming to support something that isn't final. It's getting really annoying.

A company for profit is not going to spend time and money supporting something that doesn't even have a full set of tests available go over.

Hell, it wasn't even until recently that the acid2 tests were 90% complete, thanks to Microsoft. No one even mentions that.

I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but give credit where credit is due.

By supporting more advanced technologies for web services.

It doesn't even matter if some of it is still in a draft stage; Acid3 consists of tons of standards that are way past that as well. SVG support would be one incredibly useful gap for IE to fill. Suddenly, we'd start being able to use vector graphics on the web without resorting to third party plugins.

These are among the things Acid3 tests.

I'd rather have a standard event model, a JavaScript JIT compiler, less COM in the DOM, and complete implementation of mutable DOM prototypes instead of a score of 100% in a "benchmark" that too many people put far too much importance in.

Honestly, what good do you think that would do?

His name is Vista. He wants everything rebuilt.

Vista is perfectly fine especially w/ SP2

LOL i love that quote

And this could accomplish what?

LOL!

Unsure, but one of your own news writers feels the same: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/05/06/a...ft-on-windows-8

Well, the current Trident renderer was designed waay back before we had these advanced web services. Compare to numerous other, far more successful, renderers today like WebKit, that -- not so coincidentally -- are being way faster updated to encompass more web standards than Trident. They were being designed from scratch with the kind of web we're seeing today in mind, and have already outpaced Trident, despite being far younger.

It's clear as a bright sky that Trident is not nearly as flexible and open to improvements as certain other renderers on the market today, with the huge development team backing IE as well. IE8 was a patchwork upon a patchwork, and if Microsoft would in the future switch to an open source engine running behind the scenes (seriously, why not? IE is already free), they could contribute with code to an existing project instead of maintaining this path on a rather antique web browser base. MS switching away from a proprietary engine would be a godsend for web developers getting one renderer less to care about, the breakage of sites would be no more than what breaks on e.g. Firefox or Safari (= not very much actually especially when compared to what breaks on IE, and it would be very good PR for Microsoft "doing the best for the web".

I just don't get this fear of open source at Microsoft, especially on projects like these, where interoperability is paramount and they aren't even trying to sell the product. Imagine IE9 suddenly leaping to get SVG support, 100/100 Acid3 compliance, a speed boost from one of those extremely optimized Javascript engine, and much more, with barely even any effort from Microsoft's side, leaving them time to work on completely different features with their source code fork...

I'm sure all this sounds radical and crazy, but the reason MS is still lagging behind some web renderers like this is because they aren't thinking outside the box. While Apple is about to release Safari 4 with a huge speed boost, as is Mozilla with Firefox 3.5 for smooth browsing of heavy sites like Facebook, Microsoft has not even announced any plans to do it. No, these guys just got ready crowbaring old CSS2 standards into it.

Last edited by Jugalator on 06 May 2009 - 23:10

Get rid of the bugs? Maybe make it a little faster? Maybe portable so it doesn't require the ridiculously overcomplicated installation procedure that's required to install it now? It's just a browser, but MS makes almost as much of a hassle as installing Office.

Yer i was hoping for a download manager in IE8!

i saw a download manager with Longhorn release...where's it?

IE8 is standards compliant.

Acid3 is not a complete set, it's a draft. Until it's final, don't count on them supporting any of it.

If it's not download manager, it's at least using a native looking file download dialog.

MS has and do support numerous non-standards today. Actually, they are fairly well known at excelling at it. :-p

Preferrably, and countering the idea of Acid3, the not-yet-standards should be made up by Microsoft, though.

I said up-to-date standards compliance. Standards change over time.

AMEN!

IE7pro anyone? Also works on IE8.

IE7pro works on IE8 but has a few bugs since it was designed for IE7. I do however use it for spell check and mouse gestures.

I use it as well, and yeah it's got some bugs, but I only use the spell checker and the adblock, none of the other features are on. They should have a IE8pro soon though.

After looking at their site for a bit.. there have been no updates at all. I'm convinced that either the company name change is taking longer than they thought.. or it's just dead and they vanished.

I fully agree on the spell check suggestion! It's a very handy feature that I use a lot.

it already have...IE Gallery

If not a full DM, then they should at least change the basic download system so that we can resume dropped or broken downloads. I hate having to start over.

IE should resume broken downloads already if the site supports it and you haven't cleared your cache. I've always had broken downloads zoom back to where they stopped and finish from there.

Agreed, like Google Chromes "pause/resume"

i saw a download manager with Longhorn release...where's it?

I dunno if it's suppose to happen on the server side or not but more often it won't jump back to where it stopped. And I don't clear my temp files often as well.

Still it should be done on IE's side from now on imo.

I remember reading somewhere that spell checkers actually improve people's spelling capability

I suppose you think spell checkers should be removed from Office 14 as well? We wouldn't want computers to make peoples lives easier or anything.

Last edited by GreyWolfSC on 06 May 2009 - 14:18

Isn't the IE8 rendering engine faster than FF/Chrome? It's just Javascript that lags behind.

Faster javascript is the key thing right now. IMO

(Note, this was said in response to something that looks like it was removed)

The lag when opening a new tab is actually weird. I had that problem with Vista but once I moved to Seven the browser became very snappy and now the tabs open in no time.

The tab lag is caused by bad addons... The Java SSV helper is the main culprit.

In my case it was caused by a Spybot registry entry. Deleting it did that trick.

IE8's add-on manager will tell you the load times per addon, so just look at that and see what takes long and turn it off.

Then see how performance changes.

Including an ad-blocker in the browser itself is a bad idea. That would just be opening up Microsoft to a torrent of potential lawsuits from advertisers. Also doing that would kill literally millions of sites that depend on ad revenue to pay their server bills. This would be like Sony building in a feature to auto-skip commercial breaks in TV programs. TV channels that rely on ad revenue would go out of business overnight.

No, an ad blocker should always be user choice. I do however support greater plugin support like Firefox has. Give people the choice to install an adblocker if they wish, preferably not with a third party program, but rather a plug in to the browser itself.

The add-on manager claim the slowest addon takes...0,08 seconds and I already deleted the spybot entry's. (That did make a difference (Don't really get why, since IE7 did support it after all...)). The tab lag is already better then in IE7 though...
- About the ad-blocker: they could call is "content blocker" like opera. And as far as I know, opera hasn't had any lawsuits yet... and people could just choose if they wanted to use it or not...

+10,000,000

but hey while we're at it lets make all 7 and 8 users upgrade to yaaay

Yeah, why let people choose and take responsibility for keeping their browser up to date? Especially when IE8 is already part of Automatic Updates.

That would be useful but keep it in mind that users who use old version of IE that are using old/slow computers or old version of Windows which IE8 may not be compatible for old versions of Windows or old computers. It may take a while before the users have enough money to get a new computer depends on their budget.

That's no excuse for not supporting older operating systems. Minimum configuration for Opera 9 is... windows 95 (or later). They should just make IE work under older versions of windows. and I know more then enough people who still use windows 98... and with firefox already confirmed they will stop support of windows xp sp2 (they'll still support xp sp3 or so they claim at: http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...icleId=9131576) at this rate everyone not using windows 7 soon will either have to use an outdated browser or just use opera...

Acid3 compliance ? What's this ? Making changes so as to pass a specific test means nothing, they should just implement the full CSS and DOM specifications.

Developers don't care about Acid3, blogers do.

"Terrible UI"? I believe that is your OPINION. The only thing *I* don't like about the UI is I still haven't gotten used to the refresh and stop buttons being on the right side of the address bar. I didn't like it in 7 and I don't like it in 8. But the rest? Nothing wrong with it at all, nice and clean if you set it up right.

CSS Compliance has improved, I expect it to improve a little more with 9.

Don't care about Acid 3.

Skinable would be nice.
Spellcheck would be nice.
Download manager would be great.
Speed up the draws would be great.

You can move the refresh and stop buttons by right clicking on the right of the tab area - going to customise and tick the option 'show stop and refresh buttons before address bar'
that should do the trick

Thank you! If I could e-mail treats there would be a box of cookies waiting in your inbox.

I never knew that. Thanks!

You don't use Firefox because of the download manager? :s So disable it? Main Tab -> Show Download Window and then in Privacy disable remember what I download.. should do the trick?

Edit: Oh.. I guess it won't show any progress then. : I'm sure theres an addon which can do it..

It still shows the progress in the lower-right of the status bar.

I personally use the Download Statusbar addon in Firefox. It's very unobtrusive and yet highly functional. IE would do well to include something similar. Having several little popup windows floating around my system with download status is messy.

I guess it isn't as bad in Windows 7 since all those would be grouped together on the task bar and you can check the status of the downloads in real time.

Such as?

Firefox does this well. Things more often than not open in a new tab rather than a new window, except when you explicitly state "open in new window" from the right click menu on links.

But if you don't have an internet connection, you cant search the net anyway....

They've already stated that they are not moving to Webkit, I'm unsure as to why so many people think they should. Enterprise customers wouldn't like it either!

you may temporarily not have a connection eg a laptop without a wireless signal may run the ie8.exe that they have on their hdd or usb pen.

ie8.exe?

FF is popular, because of its good marketing. Every opensource supporter has/had a nice FF logo on his webpage stating "use Firefox", "Site best viewed with Firefox"... And so people started to belive it...

IE8 already supports current standards. Acid 3 is not based on a standard, it's yet to be ratified.

To be fair though, Acid3 tests a number of standardized features.

Firefox and Chrome use different rendering engines...

That was an April Fools' joke: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/31...le-eyes-leaked/

Uhh, how is the IE team suppose to give you better Java and Flash stability when a) MS doesn't make Java, and b) MS doesn't make Flash.

Shouldn't you be asking Adobe and Sun err... Oracle, to fix Flash and Java stability since it's their products?

Whens the last time anyone had IE or even FF, crash due to Silverlight? Because I never have.

+1. Good show.

It is added. Click the little lock with the arrow going around it. Ads blocked (well, some of them anyway)

You're right, all you need is to get a adblocking list and import it into the filter and you can block pretty much every ad now.

That's not ad blocking as such, thats just a side effect. The inprivate filter just blocks content that stores and access cookies in a different domain that the site you've viewing. Or something like that :-) It's just coincidence that alot of ad providers use this method of cookies to track you, so they end up being blocked. It won't take ad providers long to work around this one.

+1

funk acid 3, as long as the browser knows hot to render proper standards it's ok with me.

+1 but atleast you can unhide it. It should be visible by default and have the option to hide it if you dont want it visible. they do the same with windows explorer in vista/windows7 which is even more annoying as theres lots of things in that menu that people use so millions of people have to un-hide it.

Two clicks brings it back in IE. Unless you are talking about Office 2007 where the inefficient menu system has been replaced with the Ribbon system. Try it you will like it if you use it with an open mind for 5 minutes.

Hitting Alt works wonders...

Just right-click in an empty space and check the Menu bar. Then it'll always be shown.

I can barely recall the last time I had to use the menu, and when I did I didn't use the mouse anyway. Alt+F brings up the menu bar with the file menu selected. It's far and away a better method that moving the mouse to the top and clicking on it.

Do you need a list or can you do your own homework? The end. Oh wait. There might be another comment. It might not be the end. We'll have to wait and see

LOL! the end.

I agre, though honestly, I've never seen a browser with a download manager I like other than Opera. I'm just too used to how IE works, I guess.

The other feature I want is something like Opera's Speed-dial feature, preferably with more than 9 slots though. Give me that & spellchecking, and I couldl ive without IE7Pro.

What the hell is wrong with the UI ? It has "Back-Forward" buttons, address bar and search bar on the top, then tabs, then the document view. That's how all the browsers behave ! Or is it the fact that you have buttons next to tabs ? Well that reduces clutter and make it easier to quickly change some settings or save a page. Why is it a great idea with Chrome and a bad idea when it comes to IE ?

because IE8 only passes acid test2 and doesnt support newer standards, no download manager and many other things.

IE should bring out a new browser each year. Just look how good Firefox 3.5 beta is, it does pretty much everything i want from a browser and has good standards support.

IE8 is certainly a big improvement but if IE9 adds acidtest3 and other technologies then web developers can make more websites feature rich and have to worry about compatability with older browsers less.

They. Are. Not. Going. To. Support. Something. That. Isn't. Final.

Until the tests are set in stone, no.

lol, when did this policy change of theirs come into effect?

MS has frequently implemented non-standard features in previous versions of the browser.

IE got that many many years ago

Yea Bonsi Buddy was a great IE Addon!

Extra -> Internet Options -> Tabs -> Settings -> Do the next thing after opening a new Tab (translated from Dutch..)

That's what you mean?

Sure there is Acid3 compliance, but for that, you need to implement certain features that are not yet standardized.

Um, works fine for me...

Windows has supported FTP operations for ages, and is done so through Windows Explorer, now not IE [since IE7]. I still prefer to use a dedicated client like SmartFTP

ftp permission are not well handled. Also, there are a lot of thing missing from it, decide the transfert mode, activate pasv or not, change the group and the permissions of this group on a file.