First Impressions of IE8 Beta 1
It's pretty buggy. Lots of stuff coded purely to standards and not to a particular browser isn't rendering correctly. All in all though, that's expected, this is not the final product, they're still hammering away on some pretty big things.
On the topic of CSS, I'm happy to see some big things from CSS2 that are finally being supported. The table display types, the box-sizing property, generated content. I'm disappointed that they still haven't done much with CSS3 though. Some things in CSS3 seem pretty trivial to me to support, like most CSS3 selectors, for example, or the :target pseudo-class. JavaScript libraries on the client-side have been supporting CSS3 selectors for ages in their various Selector API implementations.
On the JavaScript front, I'm pleased to see that IE8 will support the querySelector() and querySelectorAll() methods from the new W3C Selectors API draft specification. That makes Webkit and IE (of all browsers) the first native implementations. That's a prediction I made that I'm pleased to see fulfilled.
I'm puzzled about some baffling ommissions in the JavaScript arena as well though. Why don't we finally have W3C events? Where are things like DOMContentLoaded, forEach, etc. The IE team, at least, in my opinion, could deliver more here, and again, it seems pretty trivial to me for them to add support for most of these things. So why are the improvements so slim?
Perhaps we can hope that the IE team is not yet finished with their improvements, but IE team, if you're listening, please add support for as much of these trivial things as possible. I appreciate the big, complicated bug fixes, but, in my mind I see a lot of little things that you could easily add support for, but for whatever reason are not. I'm not going to make blanket statements like, why don't you support x specification entirely, nor am I going to spit in the face of what you've accomplished, I can see that what you do have is pretty significant, but try not to overlook the smaller things that make everybody's life easier, that you could probably get an intern to do on a Sunday afternoon.
