Firefox 3 Beta 4 and IE8 Beta 1
The moons must be in alignment or something, because both the current big browsers have released Betas of their upcoming versions.
Beta 4 of Firefox 3 is quick. Really quick. Like Velociraptor chasing you down for it’s dinner quick. The javascript heavy sites which I like to frequent these days load, render and react really quickly - Google Mail, Google reader become different beasts under FF3. Very. Impressive.
Other changes include a UI more in keeping with the host operating system (pictured above under the Leopard), simplified bookmarking (thats what the star does), and a slightly better address bar which seems to roll your bookmarks and history into one place. Overall, certainly a step in the right direction.
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly Firefox3 is taken up when it is finally released. I’ve been pleasantly surprised looking at the current penetration recently, for the sites I have access to the stats for, IE is looking at something like 2/3s of the total traffic, with Firefox being about 25% of the rest. Oddly enough (and slightly OT), i’m seeing more Safari traffic, and PSP and PS3 entering the lists..
Now, IE8… IE8. Lets not forget, IE7 broke a whole bunch of stuff when it came out, and by the sounds of it, the jolly IE gang at Microsoft don’t want to do the same thing again. Or, maybe they do. Or perhaps they haven’t decided yet. Either way, better standards support will (in the long run) improve lives on the web. It’s certainly got people talking in various places.
Actually, joking aside, the post about Martian Headsets (which is really about IE8 and standards) at Joelonsoftware is really, really good.
But is IE8 any good. Well, it doesn’t seem to have broken anything. Which I guess is a step in the right direction. It’s certainly nowhere near as quick to render or execute Javascript as Firefox3, so that isn’t good. It’s also got a big button on it which makes it render like IE7.. so, er, that obviously shows a lot of confidence in their roadmap for IE8.. :s
Looks like Firefox should be taking some more chunks out of the IE market share once the dust settles if these Betas are representative of the final products.
IE8 Beta 1 - Microsoft.com
Firefox3 Beta4 - Mozilla.com
Over at shoutingatcows, they are taking about the Activities options in IE8
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“Emulate IE7″ button has little to do with confidence in the roadmap for IE8. The issue is that millions of sites were written for IE7 and the site authors will not lockstep upgrade a million sites just because MSFT releases a new browser. Gives the user an option to see the page the way the author intended it to be seen, rather than the way some standards advocates want it to be broken to “force people to update their sites”.
If it is an option to give the user a way to see the page the author intended, then at best, it’s misnamed, and should just be called ‘compatibility mode’.
Besides (and playing devils advocate), is there anything really wrong with forcing people to update their sites so that they are actually built properly, and in the process, hopefully making the web more future proof, more accessible, etc etc?
Thirdly, if you *can* force the browser into a previous rendering mode, how is that a step forwards in any way. It’s certainly not quicker than the current FF beta (although, granted, we are only at beta 1), and now you can push it into the previous rendering mode to boot.. huh. If you don’t force people to do something, then they won’t, and we’ll presumably have to wait for IE9 for the IE8 rendering mode button, so that people will update their sites for IE8?
It’s not that I don’t think IE8 as a whole isn’t a good thing - i’m sure that it is, and I hope that the activities options open up social networking to a whole new set of people (and in the process, cause IT departments the world over a headache), it’s just that I really think you either update the browser, or you don’t - and at the moment, I don’t really think with the option there, it’s the update which it should be.