Dear Hell, IE8 is out

May 3rd, 2009 Category: General

What a surprise – after waiting a while and ignoring the Internet Explorer 7 – a new version was released. I really was not a friend of IE7 because it had the following problems for me:

Start up was slow (connecting to somewhere…)
I use a bigger font on my notebook. Otherwise it get’s hard to read characters on a 17″ TFT with 1920×1200 pixel resolution. But this bigger font caused IE7 to scale images like menu bitmaps in a ugly way. Really ugly…
IE7 often behaves different than other browsers regarding CSS issues

Firefox and Safari made things usually in a nicer way for me. So I was really interested how the new Internet Explorer 8 will behave and installed it. During installation the first annoying issue: The user has to answer 11 questions. Sure I’ve selected user defined settings which will cause some more questions, but nevertheless the questions asked are annoying for regular users. And the questions are strange, things I’m really not interested in.

Scroll down to get over the screen shots of all the questions (screen shots are German). You will probably have the same feeling during scrolling like me during IE8 installation… “Where is the end?”

So far default setup stuff…

Scrolling… scrolling…

Soon it’s done…

Ok after selecting if you want to have search machine provider list updates and so on – Microsoft also want’s to push other search machines, all others than Google ha ha – finally my first impressions:

Uh, IE8 will now import settings from Firefox and other browsers. What kind of invention
Start up seems faster, ok good.
No more ugly image scaling with my big font. Uhhhh yeah!
Clicking a link on a page again, e.g. clicking the TechniTip.Net on the top of the page a few times and you will the whole page flickering. Firefox and Safari don’t show such a behavior. Uhm.
The new feature “recommended sites” seems to be too much for my under developed mind. Went to www.ebay.de and selected recommended site, the results: yahoo.de, de.youtube.com, amazon.de, some other ebay link, web.de. Checking some other site I was not able to understand why these pages are recommended.
And the strange thing: In IE7 the old fashioned menu bar was removed. Now it comes back. Back to the rules… But: the menus introduced in IE7 on the right side are still there. The result: two menu items “Extras” are available with some different items and some identical. Someone able to understand? I’m not… The screen shot below shows both menus (photo composition of both menus on one screen done with Photoshop):