MSIE 8.0 and web standards - tell us!

[SrWebDeveloper]

This is for folks who have installed the MSIE 8.0 browser and also do web development or design.

Microsoft released the version a few days ago and lauded to the world that their version 8 is more web standards compliant than previous versions. I'd like to know if this is true, from a developer's perspective. Please post honest feedback and maybe a few examples (links or code snippets) of stuff you know isn't working in 8, or does suddenly work. This is not a bash MS topic, I'm quite serious when I ask this. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say here on the forum.

Thanks!

-jim

ps: At work here we won't install 8 yet and likely won't for a while, and at home on my iMac I haven't yet installed it on my XP Home/Parallels.

 

[angelwatt]

I installed over the weekend to take a look. Mostly I was curious my own web site looked. I was surprised to see my site did look better, probably in part because I designed for standards and not browsers.

Things that now worked are mostly concerning the box model I believe involving floats and inline-block (<IE8 only applies inline-block correctly to elements that are normally inline). I haven't looked at my CSS closely enough to figure out what specifically changed, but did notice some good layout changes. Another fix was dealing with a background image that now works (it was a specific case).

Things I've noticed still not fixed, or more appropriately, not added to IE; Still haven't implemented opacity (IE uses filter instead). They haven't added any border-radius implementation. I noticed some JavaScript issues that cropped up as well, but can't be positive they didn't exist in IE7. Mostly small stuff that took just a moment to fix though.

On my site, I have a notice for users of < IE8 that IE is not well supported on my site. I hadn't included IE8 in my browser check as I didn't want to blindly condemn it, but now that I've tried it I'm happy with the way it handles my own web site so IE8 visitors won't be seeing my message of lacking support.

So overall I think IE8 is better (yes it pains me to admit it), though the changes make it seem more like a 7.1 or 7.5 update rather than a full version change. I also find it funny that clicking on the "compatibility mode" icon makes my site look worse (that's where it makes it use the IE7 render engine). I haven't used IE8 on other sites yet though so won't comment beyond my own web site, which I code to current web standards with little regard to IE.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Anyone else?