I’ve been using the IE8 Beta 2 for a couple weeks now, and overall I must say that I’m rather impressed. I guess I should qualify that: I’m impressed by how much IE has improved over the past couple years, but considering where they were with IE6, that may not be saying that much. It’s a good browser now, but still not as enjoyable to use as Firefox.
One of my biggest pet peeves still remains: renaming a bookmark is still a separate operation from modifying its other properties. Yes, I know that with IE, each bookmark is stored in a separate file, with the filename being the name of the bookmark. As bad of a design decision as that is, there’s no reason why they can’t allow changing its name from the Properties page, and do a rename in the background if the user changes it. It’s just lazy programming to let your interface be guided by the underlying implementation.
Or better yet, store the bookmark name as a separate field somewhere so we can do wild and crazy things like put an ampersand or colon in the names of our bookmarks. Many sites (including this one) use colons to separate the site name from the page name in the title, so bookmarking such a page results in a difficult-to-read name with the "invalid" characters removed.
Another thing that isn’t fixed is the horrible tab handling. While the new Tab Groups feature is rather cool and helpful, IE still wants to open every link from external programs in the same tab. And most of the time, it wants to open up a new window for that one tab, regardless of whether I tell it to open all tabs in the same window.
And don’t get me started on its insistence of opening Word documents inside the browser window. Why does IE do this? "Because it can" is the best I can come up with. Does anyone really find this feature useful or intuitive? Does anyone like the way it replaces the IE menu bar with the Word menu bar to create a Frankenstein mashup of both programs where I can’t actually get anything done? There may be an option to turn this off, but I sure can’t find it.
Compare all of this to Firefox’s tab handling, where I can easily have all links from external programs open in new tabs in the same window and it just works. Firefox never opens a second window, and that’s the way I want it. Tabs lose much of their usefulness when users have to actually search through multiple windows full of a few tabs each to find the page they’re looking for!
The Compatibility View feature definitely needs some polish. It doesn’t show up on half the pages I need it to — I’m guessing maybe the option isn’t even offered on Strict Mode doctypes. Now, I certainly applaud Microsoft for making the right decision with IE8 and favoring standards compliance over backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, many sites still use browser sniffing to serve broken content to IE — many sites don’t display at all in IE8 — despite Microsoft’s best efforts to educate them on this. It looks like some improvements are coming soon in the next IE8 public build, so hopefully this feature works better.
So, although IE8 is definitely a huge step forward from where Internet Explorer was a couple years ago, its usability is still rough around the edges in quite a few places. I wish they would spend less time on this silly "Web Slices" concept that will quickly die and more time on thinking about how users interact with their browser and make these day-to-day issues less annoying.
UPDATE: I should probably mention that I wrote this post using Microsoft’s excellent Windows Live Writer. I’ve used Writer for a while to post to my SharePoint blog at work, and decided to give it a try against WordPress. I entered my blog URL, username, and password, and it automatically detected that it was a WordPress blog, then pulled down its locale, character set, and even its stylesheet to give me WYSIWYG editing and effortless posting.
So, Microsoft is obviously capable of making exciting new programs that are easy to use and "just work" how users expect them to. I just with they would apply a bit more of that to IE! And Microsoft, if you could create an Ubuntu version of Live Writer, that would be great, mmkay?
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