I installed the Internet Explorer 8 beta a few days ago, and I’ve tested some sites in it. So far, I’m not really impressed. It seems to pass the ACID2 test, but there are plenty of rendering bugs that drive me crazy…and they had better be fixed by the time the final release is out.
I’m very well aware that the browser is in beta, but I can’t help but be worried about this. Some pages seem to render worse than ever, and I can’t help but think “Are these bugs, or some sort of ploy to keep things as they’ve been?” It’s not really in Microsoft’s best interests to be fully standards compliant, after all.
Here are just a few examples of the render bugs I’ve noticed:
- WSC’s footer appears halfway down the page, right at the end of the sidebar, not at the bottom of the page where it belongs.
- The contents of Facebook’s main page are squished funny.
- The search bar on Apple.com appears below it’s parent navigation bar, instead of inside it.
- Digg’s header doesn’t match-up with the top of the screen, and has a bunch of extra padding below the navigational links.
- WebDesignerWall.com doesn’t look very good. The background image (which is most of the design) does not line-up correctly, because there is at least 800px of extra space inserted above the content.
- FreelanceSwitch.com looks horrible, and we’ll leave it at that.
Few sites have escaped its horrible rendering issues. Again, I know IE8 is in beta. But I wonder, how on Earth did it pass the ACID2 test with such horrible problems? Did they just adjust things until all of the ACID2 elements lined-up, messing everything else up?
I hope things improve.
