IE8 Beta 2 delivers minimal CSS support enhancements (and loses support for at least one selector)

OK, maybe a bit of a haphazard title for a post (but it is very late in the day, and I really should be getting to bed) . Anyway, the anticipated release of Beta 2 was sometime this month (August) and it was finally released yesterday.

It was always a given that Beta 2 was going to be focused on delivering an enhanced and more seemless user experience, rather than concentrating on ‘under the bonnet’ enhancements like Beta 1 tried to deliver. However, on the surface of things, they appear to be very similar; one feature that I immediately noticed had gone (at least from the top toolbar) was the - to me, this wasn’t much of a suprise as I simply could never see a practical use of that feature for end-users.

To coincide with this latest release, the IE team have also released a whitepaper detailing CSS improvments in Beta 2. For me, arguably the most major enhancement is support of the box-sizing property without the need for the -ms- prefix.

Beta 2 also supports the shorthand syntax for the filter property which can be used to emulate opacity – this must mean that IE8 don’t intend to implement the Level 3 opacity property.

Although I haven’t played around with Beta 2 for long, I have had time to put it through it’s paces on CSS3.Info’s Selector Test Suite; expecting a much better score than Beta 1s measley 14 out of 43, Beta 2 surprisingly only supports 13 selectors out of the 43.

This is only a quick write-up so will write a more concise post when I have some more time. Right, off to bed.