It has come as quite a surprise to learn that Microsoft has released a first beta version of IE8. First impressions are that this really is a beta in all sense of the word, quite a few sites are broken (Google Maps has imploded) but I don’t think this is a major concern as there’s still some way to go so and Microsoft are encouraging reports to be submitted on website problems. I can only imagine there must be quite a few arriving at the moment.
Microsoft has announced that they have listened and acted upon feedback received from the web design community with regards to their proposed version targeting in IE8. Just to recap, Microsoft had decided that IE8 would render pages by default as IE7 and standards savvy web developers would have to explicitly opt in to version targeting by means of a meta tag or HTTP header in order for IE8 to render a page as IE8.
There’s definitely a sizeable buzz in the web design community at the moment sparked by the latest news from the IE team regarding their new version targeting that will be built into IE8.
In short, IE8 will render web pages exactly the same as IE7 by default.
Robert O’Callahan, a New Zealand based developer of the Mozilla/FireFox rendering engine, has spoken about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because it will allow people to use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets in the browser even when they’re offline. Rod Drury also pointed out in his post how this makes Firefox attractive as the browser platform of choice for SaaS providers (Software as a Service) such as salesforce.com.