Let’s have a look at what Microsoft promises us with MSIE8 – the revelation for all web developers! Nah, as developer you might have enough reasons to complain about that piece of broken software, or as i call it “the browser from hell”:

MSIE8 doesn’t have JavaScript. It has JScript and it isn’t as good as JavaScript. While others implement ECMAScript 4 or partly already have, Microsoft makes idiotic proposals for ECMAScript 3.2. And they even wonder why there’s so much heavy critics on it!

In native JavaScript i can extend all my objects. I can’t do that with XMLHTTPRequest because it’s not a native object, but links to an ActiveX-control instead.

Bullshiting the customer is one thing Microsoft can really do well. MSIE still has about 50% visits on our web sites. And about 40% of all MSIE users still use MSIE 6.0. It’s also great downloading a new VirtualPC test image all 3 months [as of summer 2007].

JScript in MSIE ist still pain in the ass. Probably it supports now some part of DOM – but it does not correctly.

Debugging JavaScript in MSIE ist still pain in the ass. I got enough enough errors in „line 0?, or the line of in the middle of nowhere where MSIE shows the line number in generated code. I even got an „Unexpected error in line -237322? once!

Debug tools do not always work correctly in MSIE because the browser doesn’t work correctly.

Then, on ACID3 most stabil browser do 50-60 points at the moment, Firefox 3 does 68 and Webkit does now 100 points! And what the fuck does MSIE8? Correct. 17 points out of 100. That’s 3 points more than MSIE7 but far below what other browser do at the moment.

MSIE8 does not pass ACID2! That’s because Microsoft has to load some ActiveX-Controls to pass. For the official ACID2-test site they deactivated the checks, on other sites you may encounter a warning that the site is not safe.  ACID2 has to be passed on whatever URL the test is!

Even PNG isn’t working correctly in MSIE and not to speak about SVG support…

Wheew, and then we have now 6 downloads per host. Great increasement over the 4 pipes in the older version.

Wikipedia lists some nice tables about comparison of layout engines, including HTML, XML, XHTML, Graphics, CSS, DOM, HTML5, ECMAScript and SVG-capabilities.

Well, at least they made one thing correct: MSIE8 still outputs Mozilla/4.0 in his UserAgent string. So i can say without any doubt, that it ia still not a modern web browser!

P.S.: Hey Microsoft, get Gecko or Webkit and just shut the fucking MSIE-Thing down! You will probably be faster in implementing the bugs of the former MSIEs than making your MSIE/Trident do run correctly. And if you haven’t realised there’s also a Gecko ActiveX-Control!

I wrote this article because i had an MSIE8 testdrive and now have three stylesheets for MSIE browsers. Ah yeah, the website runs without pages and even faster in really standard-compliant browser such as Opera, Safari, Firefox, Konquerer…