Microsoft released the first release candidate of their web browser, Internet Explorer 8, today. This means that they’re not too far from releasing it to the public. If you run a self-hosted blog, you should download the release candidate to make sure that everything works as intended. If not, try and fix it.
More on Techmeme, the official IEBlog, and the overview sheet posted.
Microsoft earlier this year committed to delivering a standards compliant browser when they launched Internet Explorer 8 at some undetermined future point.
According to this article at the Register today, Microsoft has broken this promise with the release of IE8, Beta 2:
This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.
SiteMeter, the popular web statistics service, is having a huge issue at the moment. It appears that the statistics code will crash anyone visiting a site using SiteMeter with Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 or 7! That’s a whole lot of potential visitors getting “Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site” errors, and not OK of course. I’d expect people fleeing from SiteMeter now…
So what can you do if you’re a SiteMeter user? Well, remove the SiteMeter code, probably located in your site’s footer but that depends on where you put it of course. SiteMeter won’t be able to track your visitors when the code is removed, but on the other hand the people visiting your site will be able to actually see it… [Read more…]
