IT Professionals

IE8 Delivers

Posted by on Mar 20, 2009 | 10 Comments

I would be first to admit that I am generally considered a Firefox user. This is not to say that I am against using other browsers mind you, it’s just a matter of the fact that IE6 left such a long, dated, bad taste in my mouth that I never really spent a whole lot of time with IE7 on my Windows PC. Never really found a reason to. But as this article is pointing out, the latest RC for IE8 has a lot going for it. So much so, that I might very well end up preferring it over Firefox when I use my Windows box.

Now let me be clear on a few reasons why I am liking IE8.

  1. RSS handling in Firefox remains crappy. IE7 and up has always allowed me vastly better presentation of my RSS feeds as to this very day, RSS in Firefox means using those stupid Live Bookmarks or even more hop-scotch-like, Google Reader. I want it, in my browser, easily navigatable.
  2. Accelerators simply have a better feel than “KallOut” for Firefox. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that it is something that can be added. But honestly, a cleaner version of KallOut really ought to have been provided with Firefox by default.

What keeps me using Firefox?

  1. ActiveX. I don’t care what you wrap around this technology, like Java in a browser Window, I always end up disabling it. I HATE ActiveX as most anything that interacts with it is coded very poorly in my opinion.
  2. Source code. I trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them. So using their browser and not knowing what is “really” going on with a browser put out by a company so happy to embrace DRM does not make me want to rely on this browser all that much.

What say you? If IE8 turns out to be everything anyone could ever want, will you make the switch? Hit the comments, share your thoughts.

  • http://www.KallOut.com Lee Lorenzen

    Matt,

    I really appreciate the mention of KallOut in your article and I’d love to hear what it is specifically about KallOut Acclerators for Firefox that you’d like to see improved. We have only just entered the public directory and will be adding new features over the next few weeks that I’m confident will address your concerns.

    With the advent of IE8, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, the Browser Wars are definitely heating up. While everything isn’t available out-of-the-box in Firefox, the great thing is that the community of developer can continue to enhance the product in any direction that the user community finds important.

    Since KallOut Accelerators for Firefox works as a browser add’-on, it is available for Mac, PC, Linux and KallOut also features all the best-of-breed sites on hte web in its context menu. I encourage you to check it out again and predict that you will come to love its “BestGuess” search suggestions which are at the top of KallOut’s context menu that lists each of the sites that the user can send their selected text to as part of a search term.

    This new category of “selection-based search” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection-based_search ) has the possibility of becoming as important as search toolbars which now account for 10% of all searches (NOTE: roughly $2 billion in CPC revenue is derived from searches that start in search toolbars). In the same way that search toolbars allow consumers to search faster by avoiding going to Google’s home page, KallOut takes search outside the box by allowing your to search using only your mouse.

    Please send me any detailed feedback on what you;d like to see and we will do our best to incorporate it into a new release. And, once you’re comfortable with it in your Firefox browser, you can try out the Windows desktop version of KallOut that gives you the same functionality over IE6, IE7, Chrome, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Adobe Reader, etc.

    Thanks,
    Lee Lorenzen
    CEO, KallOut
    LeeL@KallOut.com

  • http://www.linkedin.com/pub/7/18b/996 EL

    Matt,

    As you mention, Firefox has a version of Accelerators too, it is called “KALLOUT – Accelerators for Firefox” It’s available as a free add-on through Firefox. See: http://bit.ly/vJKbW

    I agree with you that bundling Accelerators into IE8 makes a lot of sense. Selection-based search is really helpful. One GREAT feature of KallOut which you don’t mention is BestGuess. The challenge with selection-based search is that the user has to figure out which one to apply to his selection. It’s a little clunky once you get more than two or three. KallOut does a super job figuring out which accelerator you need to use for a given selection-based search request. Kallout — Accelerators for Firefox is actually kind of spooky that it works so well.

    Check out Kallout’s BestGuess and see what you think! I agree that it’s a big step forward for the user to have the selection-based search bundled into the browser by default, however.

    -EL

  • whizkid515

    Are you using Firefox 1.5? As of Firefox 2, there is real RSS, not just live bookmarks.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    whizkid515: Yes. the most basic of basic RSS reading ability is in there for Firefox. For example, http://www.techmeme.com/index.xml will provide you with the following options:

    - LiveBookmarks
    -Google Reader
    -Bloglines
    -Yahoo
    -Select a third party option already locally installed

    So, I am unclear as to where the REAL RSS management is in-house within the browser as none of these are that great. :)

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Lee Lorenzen: Thanks for the input. Yeah, I will need to do a roundup over the weekend and post something back here. It’s biggest problem, honestly, is that it is not pre-installed (blame Mozilla here). :)

    I will highlight the lesser stuff later on.

    Thanks

  • John Torres

    I have been having issues with IE7, and from what I have read i am not alone. First off I am a Vista User and I love it.

    I had issues of IE7 crashing very often. So, I switched to Firefox. Now at least once a day Firefox crashes but not as often as IE7.

    Another issue that I have with IE7 is that I cannot install Adobe Flash. I submitted a Trouble Ticket to Adobe Support and they sent me a procedure on how to uninstall and then reinstall Adobe Flash. I tried their suggestion and it still does not successfully install. I went so far as to change the Directory & File ownership within the Sharing and Security of the folders and all for naught.

    I have done many a Google Search and found that I am not alone with this issue but Adobe does not help. I submitted an update to my issue on the same ticket and they do not respond.

    I wish that there was a way to correct this issue. In fact I figure that there probably is but I do not know where to go from here. I have tried so many different ways to approach thi issue.

    I heard that someone with this problem installed RC IE8 and still had the problem. So, i do not believe that the final version would fix it either.

  • Ted Bruner

    I have ß’ed IE 7&8 for quite some time. I have also tried Opera, FireFox, Chrome, and Flock inter alia.
    I have preferred IE7 over the others in that it offers an immediate F-11 Full-Screen viewing, whereas FF and the others either require several steps, … each time they are started in order to effect, and never return when restarted.

    IE8, however, has given me nothing but trouble in my attempts to use it. I must admit that I open with 8 tabs, which are for AccuWeather (utilizing Flash), Weather.com, Wunderground (utilizing Java, … or visa-versa), and NASA Live.

    No matter how I chose to close it out (either all at once with the Upper-Right X) or close individual tabs, the program halts, locks up and either takes forever to close or requires 3-key forced shutdown.

    Even when I don’t 3-key, when I reopen it – even after a total cold-boot – and open my “Home” key, IE-8 seems to open, then seems to have some kind of stroke and notifies me that it must shut down, followed by each and every existing tab being “restored”. This takes time and is most annoying.

    I have just purchased this Toshiba Satellite P305D with Vista. It came bundled with SP-1 and IE-7. I have found that it is still the best of all the preferred programs and intend to stay with it until I cannot lag any longer.

    I would most appreciate some report(s) as to others who experienced this same problem and either have discovered that the latest release is “fixed” or have some “workaround” to encourage me to retry IE-8, but for now I’m not interested. I cannot remove it from my other laptop unless I re-OS.

    Sorry to throw stuff into the party blend, but somebody should speak out about negatives encountered.

  • http://www.daanberg.com Daan Berg

    Well, IE8 didn’t really work very good for me; it’s rather unstable. At least in my case.

    Well yeah, back to the beloved Firefox ;)

  • Ramesh Ramloll

    Yes they are very similar environments. Second Life is just a wee bit more tailorable. I get bored very quickly in Minecraft … I felt a lot of pain trying to actually build something that looks reasonably good.. the building tools felt limited.I think a lot of people will graduate to Second Life..especially those really want to build stuff which are a wee bit more interactive and detailed. Besides there are a lot of people who make significant money on the side from Second Life. Am not sure Minecraft has a community that does that yet. 

  • http://warcraftjournal.com/ akella

    It`s interesting how people compare these two environments.
    They are very similar, indeed. The other posts cover the similarities :)