IE8 Beta 1 released & it’s CSS support

A few hours ago, the guys at IE released the first beta of IE8. First off, it was a surprise to me that they decided to release it before SxSW; also because only a couple of days ago they released details on how they reversed their initial decision regarding the proposed opt-in standards compliancy mode.

After frantically copying over a Parallels base image to create a test bed soley for IE8, I installed it – the UI looks virtually exactly the same as IE7, with the notable addition of an ‘Emulate IE7′ button (more on IE7 emulation in IE8) and the address bar highlighting the domain name (I’m guessing to try and combat phishing attacks).

While I think it’s great that MS has bitten the bullet and , I wonder how much this new IE7 emulator feature will actually be used. Take this example for instance- the average joe uses IE8 to visit a site and notices that the site’s layout is broken, since it relies on IE7 quirks. Is the user really going to think, “Oh yeah, the site looks broken as the developer who built it has coded it with only IE7 in mind, so I’ll use the IE7 emulator – that’ll work.” Of course they won’t; they’ll simple get discontent and leave the site. My personal opinion is that this new emulator function is a half-hearted attempt by MS for them to be seen to be proactive about backwards compatibility, what with all those millions of sites that rely on IE7’s buggy CSS implementation (not to mention IE6). Similarly, developers who have coded a site with only IE7 in mind will probably not be ’savvy’ enough to even be aware of the new proprietary meta tag that switches IE8’s rendering to ‘IE7 mode’.

In terms of CSS, their really isn’t too much additional support which is disappointing to see, after all the buzz the IE guys created about passing Acid2; yes, it does for me (although a lot of people are noticing it doesn’t for them), however after carrying out some provisional tests using CSS3.Info’s Selector Test it’s frustrating to see that only 14 out of the 43 selectors passed (yes, you read that number correctly!). The press release on IE’s blog which accompanies the news does however mention quite clearly to expect “full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE8 product“. After all, considering that this version is indeed a public beta, I would have liked to have seen more CSS support out of the box.

Something that has been bugging the web community up until now is that MS hadn’t released any details to date as to what support IE8 will include for CSS3. However, after trawling through MSDN I came across a whitepaper detailing CSS 2.1 Compliance. In this paper, it mentions that while one of IE8’s main goals is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also forward looking to CSS3. It goes on to mention, that IE8 “hopes to implement some of the most requested CSS3 features by web developers and designers”.

Peter G beat me to it, by posting on the CSS3.Info site regarding CSS improvements in IE8. He did however, miss out some notable new properties- they include:-

• Generated content (including ‘counters’)
• Outline
• New ‘display’ values (supports all ‘display’ values as per the CSS 2.1 spec)
• Box-sizing (utilises new IE-specific ‘-ms-box-sizing’ until spec has been further clarified)
• Writing-mode

One nice little feature they’ve added with developers in mind is the first installment of “… great, built-in developer tools” – again, they promise more is on the way.

Webslices are another new feature debuting in IE8; they’re basically portions of arbitrary websites to which a user can subscribe to. The HTML annotations for which Webslices relies on, are derived from the hAtom microformat.

Update: Since publishing this article, MS have released a new document outlining planned CSS3 support in the public release candidate of IE8; I also discuss this document in .