The Release Candidate of IE 8 has been released and, naturally, I have it downloaded and installed. Not had the chance to play with it much though, although I’m curious to see if it still breaks the menu on the BMTG website¹. If it does, I’ll be reporting it to Microsoft (which I should have done earlier, if only there’d been a clear way of doing this – I’ve only come across the link more recently).

What I do know is that, as an “average” Joe, I’m not impressed. Microsoft have said…

We have made IE 8 the best browser for the way people really do use the web

Really? It looks pretty much like IE7. There’s a lot of tinkering “under the hood” but as an average customer, what does that mean to me? WebSlices and Accelerators? I think not and I’ll bet money now that most people won’t use these facilities. In fact, I’ll quietly bet now that Microsoft end up retiring these features in later versions.

It is apparently quicker. But, looking at the last beta release, it would appear that it’s still not caught Firefox or Chrome. Quicker but not quickest.

It is apparently more secure – it has a privacy feature that already exists in Chrome and is likely to be in the next version of Firefox.

I’ve only downloaded IE8 for the purpose of website testing. Can anybody give me a single good reason why I should move back to IE from Firefox? Can anybody give me a good reason why IE users won’t continue to move to alternative browsers? I suspect not. As Microsoft so often does, it throws features at a product that people don’t really want. If IE8 was secure, extremely fast and had the kind of plugins that Firefox uses then THAT would be a good product.

It’s a shame, because they seem to have done such a good job with Windows 7.

Update: The BMTG site DOES work with the new version of IE8. Hurrah. That’s another bug fixed. However, I still took the opportunity to install their plugin for reporting broken web pages. Ironically it’s not working right now – their server is too busy. So much for this being past beta stage.

Update #2: Test of new IE here. Conclusions – slow, renders badly and still has problems. Don’t agree with a lot of their “positives” though.

1. don’t try it… I have the Meta tag in place at the moment that runs it in IE7 compatibility mode [↩]

That’s my YSlow rating for the BMTG website.

It’s taken me a year but I’ve done it. The only thing missing – that elusive 9% – is a CDN. But I’m not going to have that so I now have the highest rating I can achieve.

Once this site is at its new host, I’ll start looking at the same thing (restrictions on the .htaccess file, amongst other things, prevents me at the moment).

To put this in perspective, Amazon.co.uk and Apple.com both have a score of 63%, Microsoft.com a score of 94% and PC Pro a score of 52%. Google, not surprisingly, scores 99%. What is surprising, though, is that Yahoo – the people who originated this scoring system – gets 82%.

No, sorry this isn’t going to a review of all the new snazzy gadgets and the such that IE8 may have. Let’s get to the crux straight away… I use Firefox. I use IE, however, to test my websites on to ensure compatibility.

I tried IE8 at an early beta and, well, I didn’t have it installed long. The BMTG website had hideous issues and Microsoft Money crashed every time I launched it. So after testing the meta tag that lets me run a site in compatibility mode, I removed it.

Now it’s reinstalled and I’m… well, happy. Ish. At the moment.

Money now works. My site isn’t as bad. I removed the compatibility flag on the test version of the site and the old issue of the menu dividing itself into 2 was no longer present. But an extra big space under the top menu was – this turned out to be because the menu was too wide for IE8. It works fine with IE7 and, indeed, every other browser. Anyway, shortening it by one pixel did the trick.

The big downer though was that the links on the top menu don’t work properly – the links only work when you point at the border undeneath the menu option – a whole one pixel thick line. No idea why and IE8 doesn’t have any way (that I can see) of reporting bugs back to Microsoft. So I’ve resorted to one of their forums – although even that directs people to report bugs on a Microsoft website which simply has lots of useless links but nothing, nothing, about actually reporting a bug. I thought the idea of Beta versions of products was to get the general public to test them for you and get reports back of issues? So what is it if you can’t do that? That sounds to me like a buggy and unfinished final release!

Anyway, it’s staying for the time being but I’m not going to make any site changes until the final version is released.