Legal Marketing & PR

IE 8: Whats Hot, Whats Not.

By Kyle Aikens

You may have heard Internet Explorer 8 has been released… or not. IE8 was released last month, in what some are calling the worst marketing campaign of all time.   People have been writing articles lately using IE8 as a case study, on how NOT to launch a marketing campaign on a new product.   Microsoft did a horrible job marketing the new browser, and it has not had a very good first month on overall downloads. This is a hard blow to Microsoft considering Mozilla’s Firefox 3 broke a world record on June 17th, 2008 for the most software downloaded in a single day, with over 8 million downloads!

Internet Explorer 8…

Whats Hot!

• Follows CSS 2.1
• HUGE increase in support of web standards, but not quite there.
• Compatibility Mode - You can view a site in IE7 or IE8

Whats Not…

• Benchmarkings say its pretty slow compared to other available browsers
• They created a meta tag that is IE specific to your browser in compatibility mode, this is a giant step back for web standards.  For the past 5 years or so all our web community has been trying to do is converge all browsers into a “standard”.  Now IE8 is setting us back by not just adhering to the same standards as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera and instead giving a patch to a problem they should have just fixed in the first place.
• Has a new set of Development Standards, which forces us all to develop new Javascript.  Awesome javascript “widgets” such as various lightboxes, image galleries, and image replacement scrips will not work in IE8.   IE8’s solution?  run it in IE7. Using this meta tag will throw your browser into compatibility mode, and lock the user into using IE7…

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

Pretty cool solution, but still like i said this is just a patch to a problem that should of just been addressed instead of temporarily fixed.  Honestly I’m just happy there is a solution, its very Microsoft like to not address problems at all.

Summary

Its not a bad product honestly…  By far Microsoft’s best attempt at making a reliable web browser.

Download IE8 Today!

Full post as published by PaperStreet Web Design: SpeakOut on April 08, 2009 (boomark / email).