Tag Archives: RC1

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 (Part 2)

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I forgot to mention in my previous post that you shouldn’t be surprised if you see web pages displaying incorrectly in IE8. The reason is that Microsoft has decided to add a super standards mode to IE8. According to Mary Jo Foley in the ZDNet Forums blog,

That mode (super standards) was set to be one of three supported in the next version of Microsoft’s browser. (The other two are “quirks” mode, which will be compatible with current IE pages and applications and a “standards” mode, which will be the same as what’s offered by IE 7 and “compatible with current content.”) In super-standards mode, early internal builds of IE 8 passed the Acid2 standards tests, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft originally planned to make the super-standards mode an opt-in choice and the IE 7 “standards” mode the default — claiming that by doing so, Microsoft would ensure better backwards-compatibility with existing Web sites and applications. But that decision angered those who felt Microsoft was shirking its commitment to make IE more standards-compliant.

So what to do? Easy—run IE8 in Compatibility view. Do this by going to Tools > Compatibility View Settings. At the bottom of the window that appears, put a check next to Display all websites in Compatibility View. Click Close. Now all websites you go to will display properly.

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Internet Explorer 8 RC1

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It’s almost been a month since I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 8, RC (Release Candidate) 1. I’m aware that IE continues to get bashed by a lot of folks out there who lambast it for its speed, its security flaws, its crashes, etc etc. I’ve been using Internet Explorer since version 5, way back in the era of Windows 95 and 98 (anyone remember these operating systems?) Of course I’ve had my share of cockups with IE (all versions since 5). So why do I continue to use it? Because overall, to me at least—it’s not a bad browser. By the way, this post won’t be doing any “browser bashing”—period. I’ve had enough of that.

IE7 has served me quite well during my XP and Vista days. Naturally it crashes once in a blue moon (again bear in mind these are my own experiences) and I was quite miffed there wasn’t any way to recover my previous browser sessions (a la Firefox). Then along comes IE8 Beta 2. Touted to be faster than its predecessor, and with new features like web accelerators, web slices (pizza off the web?) etc. I couldn’t resist installing it. And I uninstalled it even before the day ended. Reason being most of my favorite plug-ins did not work with it. Oh well.

Then in late January 2009, the big M introduced IE8 RC1—oh, these terms are cool, no? You know me—I downloaded and installed this new build. And what do you know—all my plug-ins (like Roboform and Acrobat) worked like a charm. Not bad, not bad. Furthermore, page rendering is faster compared to IE7, and if you’re so unfortunate that a session crashes, all you have to do is close it and up pops a window (akin to Firefox) asking you whether you want to resume the previous session. And there’s this InPrivate Browsing feature. To quote Microsoft,

InPrivate Browsing helps prevent Internet Explorer from storing data about your browsing session. This includes cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and other data. Toolbars and extensions are disabled by default. See Help for more information.

I like this feature because it keeps my browsing private. And my CCleaner has less cleaning to do, lol. The only snag is that plug-ins are all disabled, so this feature is strictly for browsing only. Maybe they might add an option for turning on plug-ins in IE8’s final build? And talking about the final build, there are rumors that IE8’s RTM build will be released next month—this cannot be substantiated yet at the moment. Whatever it is, I do like using the RC1 version of IE8, and look forward to the final build with anticipation.

If you’re interested in giving IE8 RC1 a test drive, download it here.

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