waffle

IE8 beta 2 just came out.

I’m a critic of IE7 and now IE8′s UI layout, because it steals the worst parts of the new Vista organization, and the Vista organization is just not that good. (Short aside on the Vista organization if you missed it: menus are gone, except when they’re not. If you’re going to uproot things, go all the way because that’s the only way you’ll make it work. Also, many programs are now somehow web pages with flow layouts and links. That’s the closest analogy I can find, but it’s not perfect because it implies that IE should fit hand in glove, and it just doesn’t.)

IE8 has improved substantially in standards support but is still far behind, and the IE team seems to be wasting most of their time on gimmicks. Now, they can’t swap in one of the UI guys to help fix rendering bugs or to start implementing parts of CSS3, but they sure as hell can make standards even more of a priority. Beta 2 has yet to provide any new breakthroughs, which is a bit unnerving since a fair bit of the previous process turned out to be the same old game of providing the solution using their own creations — despite being shot down in the HTML5 working group before!

What Beta 2 does deliver on is security and richness of the UI. When you follow several different trails in parallel by opening links from different tabs, the tabs are color-coded accordingly. When you search or type into the address bar, suggestions and preliminary results appear (not unlike the Awesome Bar). And when you open a new tab, you are provided some starting points in a way that could just as easily be helpful as annoying, but they are a great step.

The stump response to these points of progress is careful acknowledgement and a tirade detailing how Firefox or Opera or your BSD-based toaster running your Lynx fork did this years ago. I will admit to having used extensions to have Firefox color tabs on Windows years ago, but I don’t think this is relevant. This sort of “we were first” dick-waving used to be relevant to two issues: tabs and a reasonable standards-compliance (that one’s still true), because every other competitor had had them for years when Microsoft finally started IE back up with IE7. IE6 was, and still is, literally holding back the web from progress.

Microsoft is adopting these things to the benefit of the user, and to the best of my knowledge they’re the first to ship all three out of the box in any release. Credit where credit is due, and Microsoft deserves a “good on you” for the parts where they do succeed in pleasantly surprising me, even if I wish there were more such parts.