Like a fat kid running a foot race, IE8 has finally arrived. Everyone cheers as Microsoft wallops across the finish line otherwise known as W3C compliancy. Congratulations Microsoft have a snickers and a gatorade, job well done.
On the outside, IE8 looks and feels exactly like IE7. In fact I had upgraded and couldn't remember if I had or not and had to check since it looks so close.
There are some added features that are pretty nice. One of the touted new features is web slices which as I understand it allows an updated preview of a site from your Favorites. In other words you add a site to your favorites and you don't have to visit the site to see updates, you can just mouse over it - or something. I actually didn't see this feature since it's not intuitive to turn it on, and it really isn't important to me.
Developer tools have been added. Now, when I heard this was built in I thought it would be watered down and not really useful. On the contrary, they really did a great job with this tool. Although I know this isn't for the average user, but for website designers and developers it's great. The tool allows you to do backward compatibility checks with IE7. It gives you some outline views of the html, css, and has a lot of nice debugging tools.
InPrivate feature is worth the upgrade for most. You can switch your browser to this mode and surf the web anonymously. This is particularly useful if you someone sends you a link to 'check it out' and you are not sure of the site's validity. Of course there are other uses, and I'll let your mind wander freely in the gutter with that. This is a feature only available at this time in Google Chrome and Apple Safari. In my opinion Internet privacy is to become extremely important to users. Two thumbs up to Microsoft on this one for getting ahead of Mozilla Firefox on this one.
Accelerators have been added to the IE8 abilities. This allows mouse-over actions to be performed if the web developers build it in using some pretty simple XML code. An example could be mouseing over an address link showing an in-page pop-up of a localized map. This is going to be a really exciting new feature or really bothersome depending on the designs to come.
The rendering engine... Now this is the most important upgrade Microsoft has done. The first question is typically, "Is it fast?" The answer is "OH YEA!" IE8 is rockin' fast! In speed tests performed by PC World's article, 'Browser Showdown IE 8 vs. Firefox", IE 8 left Firefox sitting on it's tail bone in a cloud of dust, according to them it is almost twice as fast. However, as PC World points out, speed matters less these days due to broadband connections being so commonplace. As long as you aren't annoyed by the load times taking too long, then faster isn't necessarily better.
IE8 is important, seriously it is.
IE8 is important because web developers around the globe don't want IE6 to be important. IE6 followed it's own set of rules and in its hay day in November 2003, 72% of people surfing the web used IE6 according to browser statistics by w3schools.com. When Firefox stormed the gates and challenged status quo with it's beatifully web compliant browser a lot of pages on the Internet looked like crap. This is because those pages defied the rules set by W3C for all browsers to work properly in order for them to look cool in the most popular browser at the time, IE6.
IE8 is web compliant. So now if everyone follows the rules, you page will look great in IE8, it will look great in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. etc. So you may as why would Mircorsft comply if they had 97%. Well it's a trending thing actually, despite that some websites didn't look all that great IE6 was terrible enough compared to Firefox that people have migrating over to other browsers by the thousands. Microsft had to comply or get out of the browser business. In fact, according to the same browser stats performed by w3schools.com for March 2009 IE6 has 17% of the market, IE7 24.9, and Firefox has 46.5%. Each month Firefox gains a half of percentage point and IE6/7 loses a full percentage point.
I recall when IE7 betas were out and it was compliant. However, millions of poorly written websites wouldn't run on it, so by the time it hit beta 3 IE7 became the middle ground disabling the worse parts of IE6 but keeping enough of them as to not totally shock the world wide web with broken forms and misplaced images.
Why upgrade?
For most, it will happen without you knowing it. IE8, just as IE7 did, will be added to the automatic updates for Microsft XP and Vista and will most likely come standard in Windows 7 at it's pending release. Corporate users are the wore proponents of dragging their feet with upgrades, and for really good reasons, mostly for network stability more than anything. It sometimes is more cost effective not to be cutting edge.
However, in this case throw caution to the wind my friends. The global web development community has long awaited the death of IE6 so that the web world can live in peace under the love and care of W3C standards. There are plenty of forums that want to stop doing browser compatibilty checks completely for IE6, so in turn everything would start looking a bit funny in IE6 on newer sites. Odds are though, and the smart path will be that limited compatability checks will exist for another couple of years. You'll see that if you use IE6 it won't look as nice, it won't load as fast, the page just isn't the same unless you are using a newer browser. And then, as quickly as IE8 came in, IE6 will fade away.