Microsoft Releases Beta 2 of IE8

"InPrivate" browsing, eh... pr0n mode activate!!! :D

Look ok so far, but it's only be running a few minutes. Loads fast, memory usage seems on par with IE7 (running XP Pro x64 here), looks pretty much the same to me. I've "converted" to Firefox 3 recently, more accurately Portable Firefox 3 but, same thing.

I'll probably mess with it some more then get rid of it as for now IE7 works fine, and I've been beta testing crap for decades, I'm sick of it personally.
 
Well, I am a IE7 user and dont plan on ever switching companies as far as IE is concerned. I just downloaded it and am going to give the new version a shot.
 
I'm an IE user as well, just downloaded IE8 B2, it's fast on some pages IE7 and IE8 B1 were slow on, and overall looks nicely done. Unfortunately, 'standards mode' messed up this inputbox on this page by putting the scroll bar in the middle of the box towards the left side, but hitting the compatibility mode button fixed it. Overall I think it's cool.
 
Not using any IE until they move all of the Back, Forward, Home, Stop, Refresh buttons back to the top-left hand side.
 
You actually use those? Seriously? I don't even have buttons on Firefox anymore... wow. I do all my Back/Forward stuff with mouse rocker action (it's just a two button wheelmouse - no use for the wheel button), and I can hit Escape faster than moving the mouse to click Stop also, and refresh is F5. My home page is about:blank... interesting.
 
Joe Average said:
You actually use those? Seriously? I don't even have buttons on Firefox anymore... wow. I do all my Back/Forward stuff with mouse rocker action (it's just a two button wheelmouse - no use for the wheel button), and I can hit Escape faster than moving the mouse to click Stop also, and refresh is F5. My home page is about:blank... interesting.
Click to expand...

I still use them sometimes, probably because I'm used to using them. Escape does the stop? I'll keep that in mind.

My homepage is www.google.ca. :D
 
You can set IE's default Search to Google, yanno, then you wouldn't need that home page as the Search bar is always there. ;)
 
Downloaded it and tried it on my XP Pro machine. Works just fine. Windows Sharepoint Service 2.0 and 3.0 works, Exchange Webmail works, Citrix Access Essentials works, TSWeb works..

Can't honestly tell if it's snappier or not because my computer's too fast anyways, so if "opens instantly" is considered snappy, then it's snappy, but then I had no problems with IE7 either.

The average user might not be able to tell the difference between IE7 and 8 at first glance, but most of us here could. The first telltale sign is the address bar. IE8 boldens domain names and fades subdomains and page names. For example http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU0MCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA== would read as http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU0MCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Most important of all, HardForum works ;)
 
err the URL example didn't quite show the way I meant it to show.
 
I can't recommend installing this. It crashes on exit, I can't find an uninstall link, and I've tried to remove it with system restore twice and it failed. I didn't expect a lot from a beta, but I thought I would at least be able to get rid of it. :mad:
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
I can't recommend installing this. It crashes on exit, I can't find an uninstall link, and I've tried to remove it with system restore twice and it failed. I didn't expect a lot from a beta, but I thought I would at least be able to get rid of it. :mad:
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That's what stuff like VirtualPC 2007 and VirtualBox and VMWare are for... screw around as much as you like without hurting a thing. ;)
 
Joe Average said:
That's what stuff like VirtualPC 2007 and VirtualBox and VMWare are for... screw around as much as you like without hurting a thing. ;)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I should have known better. I just don't have any Vista images in Virtual PC. I did finally figure out that if you click on the "View installed updates" link on the Programs and Features window you can uninstall it from there. Everything seems to be back to normal. Maybe I 'll give it another shot when it goes final. It's too unstable for me. I do run some addons that may have conflicted, but I'm not giving them up to run this.
 
To uninstall ie8, search for view installed updates (or just updates) in control panel.
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
I can't recommend installing this. It crashes on exit, I can't find an uninstall link, and I've tried to remove it with system restore twice and it failed. I didn't expect a lot from a beta, but I thought I would at least be able to get rid of it. :mad:
Click to expand...

That's a feature.
 
IE8 is finally looking comparable to Firefox and Safari/Webkit. Of course Firefox wins because of plugins. But at least IE8 is much more standards compliant to make web developing easier.

I just ran IE8 x64 vs Firefox 3.1_32 vs Webkit Nightly on the Sun Spider benchmark.

http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

q6600 @ 2.8GHz.

IE8 = 6.5 seconds
Firefox = 3.6 seconds
Webkit = 3.2 seconds

Although, in IE's credit, webpages are not just javascript, and IE8 render most webpages pretty damn fast. But it can't compare to Firefox with adblock and network tweaks. Or Webkit's blazing fast rendering engine that is 100% ACID3 compliant.
 
Cyrilix said:
Not using any IE until they move all of the Back, Forward, Home, Stop, Refresh buttons back to the top-left hand side. To me, that was the worst faggotry they've pulled.
Click to expand...

Amen! I would also like to know how to get rid of the stupid Live Search field and move the favorites and menu buttons into one row. At least you can get rid of browser tabs.
 
MH Knights said:
Amen! I would also like to know how to get rid of the stupid Live Search field and move the favorites and menu buttons into one row. At least you can get rid of browser tabs.
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Click the tiny arrow on the right of the magnifying glass button and select "manage search provider" and chose your preferred search provider such as Google. Firefox has this forever and so did IE7.
 
Good job MS!

IE's DOM support still sucks though. It's still ages behind Opera, Firefox and Safari's.
 
Cyrilix said:
Not using any IE until they move all of the Back, Forward, Home, Stop, Refresh buttons back to the top-left hand side. To me, that was the worst faggotry they've pulled.
Click to expand...

IE8 B2 has an option called "Show stop and refresh buttons before address bar" which does what you want. I tried it because I used to like that way better, but after several times of going to the wrong spot, I just switched it back. Guess I'm use to this way now. :p
 
isnt the standard for unistallation the add/remove programs menu? ide imagine your uninstall function might be there
 
Martyr said:
isnt the standard for unistallation the add/remove programs menu? ide imagine your uninstall function might be there
Click to expand...

IE is probably a special case due to this major lawsuit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer#United_States_v._Microsoft

IE used to be so closely integrated with Windows that Microsoft considered it a system component rather than a separate program. That it still shows up in the Windows updates list rather than the program list may be leftover from all that legal brouhaha.
 
It's not as good as I was hoping. Some sites are faster, and some are slower. I have noticed a lot of script warning boxes on a hell of a lot of big sites.

The Acid Test 3 fails badly, with a score of 21/100, and what's funny, is the huge "FAIL" written in the top left of the screen! lol

The Acid 2 test renders perfectly though.
 
evilsofa said:
IE is probably a special case due to this major lawsuit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer#United_States_v._Microsoft

IE used to be so closely integrated with Windows that Microsoft considered it a system component rather than a separate program. That it still shows up in the Windows updates list rather than the program list may be leftover from all that legal brouhaha.
Click to expand...

That would be a good possibility. It's just not the first place you would look for it. I'm irritated that a system restore wouldn't get rid of it.

I don't like the appearance of it. The close button on the toolbars is handy, but the flat look of it takes me back to the 90's. I also didn't like that clicking the desktop shortcut opened it with addons disabled, and that according to the help file the fix for that is to launch it from the start menu. I hope the final improves between now and November. I was looking forward to IE8 after playing with the beta 1, but I couldn't get this off my machine fast enough. :(
 
devil22 said:
I'm an IE user as well, just downloaded IE8 B2, it's fast on some pages IE7 and IE8 B1 were slow on, and overall looks nicely done. Unfortunately, 'standards mode' messed up this inputbox on this page by putting the scroll bar in the middle of the box towards the left side, but hitting the compatibility mode button fixed it. Overall I think it's cool.
Click to expand...

I had that same problem with beta1. It didn't like hardforum so I always went back to IE7 compatibility mode for it to work.
 
Exavior said:
I had that same problem with beta1. It didn't like hardforum so I always went back to IE7 compatibility mode for it to work.
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Actually after having just installed IE8 beta 2 it appears that a lot of the older problems I had with this site are fixed. Before stuff wasn't in the correct location, trying to highlight stuff didn't work correctly, cursor in the text box was never were you clicked, moving the cursor up or down a line of text would no work...

For me, the scroll bar is in the correct location. Only problem I seen was the box around the smilies wasn't drawing correctly at first but after a short while it fixed itself.

I've only been using this for a few moments now, but I can already see some nice changes. The biggest is that compatilbity mode no longer requires you to restart your browser. That was one thing that I truely hated about beta 1. Page compatiblity with IE8 seems to be better.

I've open and closed it a few times without any crashes. Not too sure about the suggested search function right now, i'll have to use it some more to try to get use to it.

Overall for me at least, it seems better than IE 8 beta 1. For those not seeing an improvement, report the problems to microsoft so that they can fix them for the final version.

As for those who can't figure out how to uninstall it. You may not be able to. I installed beta 1, then XP SP 3. So when I installed beta 2 I was given a message about how I install a service pack since I installed the last beta therefore if I install beta 2 I will not be able to uninstall it. Did you guys happen to get something like this also and just ignore it?
 
Ok, so I thought I would give it another run in Virtual PC. It is an XP image, and I am sorry to say it looks better in XP than in Vista. Good if you are running XP, bad for Vista. I also realized that I had updated this image to SP3 after I had installed the beta 1, and you cannot uninstall beta 1 if you have upgraded the service pack. So fair warning, do not install these IE betas and then update the service pack on your OS unless you want these to become permanent. On the up side, it let me install the beta 2 anyway.
 
The zoom feature has been improved a lot over IE7. It would have been nice to have an emulate IE6 option for connecting to older Nortel systems and HVAC webCTRL systems.
 
Exavior said:
As for those who can't figure out how to uninstall it. You may not be able to. I installed beta 1, then XP SP 3. So when I installed beta 2 I was given a message about how I install a service pack since I installed the last beta therefore if I install beta 2 I will not be able to uninstall it. Did you guys happen to get something like this also and just ignore it?
Click to expand...

That is a known issue with SP3:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950719

SP3 does not include IE7, and installs updates to IE6, regardless of whether you have IE7 or IE8 installed. This breaks uninstallation of IE7 or IE8. Whenever you install SP3, you need to make sure you've uninstalled versions of IE later than IE6.

To fix your problem, you need to uninstall SP3, uninstall IE8 beta 1, then install SP3. After that you'll be able to install and uninstall later IE versions at will.
 
Cyrilix said:
Not using any IE until they move all of the Back, Forward, Home, Stop, Refresh buttons back to the top-left hand side. To me, that was the worst **** they've pulled.
Click to expand...

Well, the back and forward buttons were never moved from the top-left hand side, however in IE8 you have the option to put the Refresh and Stop buttons back up there too.
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
Ok, so I thought I would give it another run in Virtual PC. It is an XP image, and I am sorry to say it looks better in XP than in Vista. Good if you are running XP, bad for Vista. I also realized that I had updated this image to SP3 after I had installed the beta 1, and you cannot uninstall beta 1 if you have upgraded the service pack. So fair warning, do not install these IE betas and then update the service pack on your OS unless you want these to become permanent. On the up side, it let me install the beta 2 anyway.
Click to expand...

Unless I am missing something it looks about the same as IE7 as far as I can tell.
 
Exavior said:
Unless I am missing something it looks about the same as IE7 as far as I can tell.
Click to expand...

The layout is very similar, but where IE7 toolbars were rounded and shiny looking, IE8 toolbars are dull and flat, and are a more bluish color.
 
Nice features.

Installed this afternoon- seems to work fine for the most part.

Crashed on me ONCE, but I don't know if it was IE7 Pro or any other kind of addon causing it, but I haven't had it happen again (and naturally it at least has the ability to RESTORE SESSIONS).
 
Noticing woot.com doesn't fully work in IE8 mode, compatibility mode seems fine.
Also this quick reply thing here on [H] does not work in IE8 either, compatibility is once again fine.

Really though, like it. Love the Private Mode, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to tell it to open new windows/tabs always in private mode (seems to be a per-session setting). Of course I did not look long.

Wish Microsoft would have included built-in spellchecker, and a decent PW manager too (on half the websites- doesn't even prompt... FF's kicks butt in this respect).
 
Bleh... go back to school and learn to spell properly, dammit. :)

And remember, it's BETA, it's not done yet, and has a ways to go. Who knows what they might throw in before it's final... who knows...
 
Joe Average said:
Bleh... go back to school and learn to spell properly, dammit. :)

And remember, it's BETA, it's not done yet, and has a ways to go. Who knows what they might throw in before it's final... who knows...
Click to expand...

Yea, I know it's BETA. But BETA 2 of IE8 I would expect to be fairly complete... Granted Vista is nothing like its Betas but IE7 is much like the final Betas.


Also found another problem with IE8- crashes WITHOUT FAIL on OWA. Posted in General Software forum to see if anyone else gets the same thing, but that's a huge downside if Microsoft's own plugins won't work ;)
 
Now you're thinking there's issues with plugins that were made for IE7 most likely not working in beta software... see how silly it gets? And betas are rarely feature complete in my experience. Close, but not quite done just yet.
 
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