IE8 officially released

Not sure I have the answer other than cloning your vhd to create a new disk image that you can then attach to a new VM and install or upgrade that to IE8

http://srackham.wordpress.com/cloning-and-copying-virtualbox-virtual-machines/

I really dislike the prospect of yet another fliiping browser to check for, I think it might be lost sight of but if your overworked and having to manage many aspects of web development projects having yet more browsers to worry about becomes yet more time lost that you don't have, I absolutely hate MS inability or unwillingness to deal with their god awful outdated browsers, we now have IE6 IE7 IE8 to be concerned with.

I went to microsoft to take a look at IE8, because i dodn't know they were releasing a new one. All I found was a video about how much faster this new version is, wich I'm sure you have seen already. Nothing about any of the bugs, or problems the there are with it. Just how it's X times faster than FireFox, and Chrome.

I used to love IE, but that's before i started having problems with it in my coding. Wich I still haven't figured that part out yet. Hints my last post on herehttp://csscreator.com/node/34781, but hey if microsoft is more worried about speed and easier browesing, then I'm goin to stick with FireFox.

Oh bye the way here's the video incase you dint get to see it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/videos.aspx?mname=IE8_Perf_Test2

I've been running IE7&8 in a couple of guest VMs* on my Debian box. While 7 is a noticeable bug-fix improvement on 6, 8 is actually a modern browser. I'm not fond of its UI, and I'm sure there are bugs to be found, but it looks as if MSFT finally got something right.

cheers,

gary

* Oddly enough, Vista seems to run better/faster in Vbox than it did when running on the bare metal machine itself. :shrug:

Interesting, I had thought the very same thing. Vista 64bit 3.3Ghz dual core full 8GB of fast ram available for vista to use Vs VM Vista 2.33Ghz dual core 1.5GB ram. Vm Vista seems to have the edge, had thought perhaps because it's disk image and not really having to thrash around a hard drive to find all it's bits .

Could be. Sure doesn't help with boot speed, though. But, that probably lies at the feet of that particular silliness, the registry. Why in hell would anyone think it's a good idea to tie user space applications into the OS?

I just did upgrade from IE8rc to IE8.0.xxx and it took forever. I had to close IE and then reboot after the install, losing my existing session. OTOH, I upgraded Opera on my little Debian box. It was download the .deb package, run dpkg -i to install (I could have used the GUI installer, but why bother when the CLI is so simple?), then restart Opera. No reboot. No session loss. In probably 20% of the time Vista took.

Gawd! How can anyone expect to be productive in a Win box? I do understand that from NT on, Win is more Unix-like, but MSFT still misses the core tenets of a good OS.

:bigoops: went off topic. :blushing: I meant to mention that IE8 now supports {display: run-in;} along with Safari and Opera. I hate to acknowledge IE has bettered Firefox in anything, but this is a Firefox bug that I hope will get some quick attention.

cheers,

gary

display:run-in; excellent; it's little properties such as this that we need to not just talk about but be able to actually use.

The browser development world needs to get hunkered down and actually decide how they are flipping well going to manage implementing CSS, MS need to bite the bullet and force ignorant users into upgrades whether they like it or not and simply make it very very clear that support for their old browsers is rescinded and any rendering issues are due to using an outdated browser. Developers need to stop any cross browser checks what so ever and only code to the Standards, browsers that don't comply or that are buggy are the users problem, change the browser, browser vendors will then ensure that they roll out fixes very quickly, and yes I live in a dream world, and yes I know all the sensible contra arguments.

Yes we know the abysmal and horrific approach MS took with the registry, it is the biggest cause of system slowdown and one god awful thing to fix, I use to do registry compact procedures and they were nerve racking tense episodes as you sat watching the c:\ prompt doing nothing whatsoever for hours wondering whether the OS had hung, if it had what would be the outcome of a hard boot at this stage, was it wise to have done this at all

They do appear to be getting their act together though. While Vista is too slow and seems to have many little issues, in a domain environment it feels like a more serious workstation and security is definitely improved as is general system administration which is far more in line with the 2003/8 servers.

At the end of the day we aren't going to be able to do away with MS like it or not it will dominate a huge chunk of the market so we need them to get their act together and get on with Win 9 or whatever it's called.

Mainstream support for XP stops next month. So I guess that means from that point on, MS won't officially be supporting IE6 any longer either.