Internet Explorer 8

This post was written 3 years 11 months 5 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

The first Beta of IE8 has been released for developers. And, yes, I have a copy.

First impressions? Well, apart from the first run after the install hanging, and it prompting me during the install for how I’d like it set-up and then not doing what I asked, it’s gone relatively smoothly I’ve not had a chance to look at the new features yet, only to try out my sites. And they break. Not badly, but they break.

The most immediate solution to this is to add the following to your HEAD (which I found in a Whitepaper)…

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">

This will force IE8 to display the page as it would in IE7. It’s not ideal but when IE8 is doing strange stuff with your web pages that no other browser is, it makes you wonder whether it’s worth changing your code (especially as this is a beta… some of those breakages may not be valid). I’m loath to change my sites based on a beta, but at the same time don’t want IE8 going live and my sites not being ready… the above META tag is the ideal solution.

Never-the-less I’ll keep IE8 installed on my home PC. I found a solution for running IE7 separately (I already do for 5.01, 5.5 and 6) so I can continue to test with that.

The default home page for IE8 has lots of useful links to resources. There are also release notes available, a “readiness toolkit” and lots more available at the IE Developer Center.