Well it seems that Microsoft has done it again. They have released another new piece of software meaning us developers have to rethink how we do things. They did it with Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Server 2008 and now Internet Explorer 8 joins the crew.

I remember when Mozilla overtook Microsoft in usage statistics with the release of Firefox 2.0. Faster browsing, a nicer user interface, a cool name, the works. Firefox 2.0 did everything you wished Internet Explorer (version 6 at the time) did and more. As Firefox grew bigger and bigger, Microsoft frantically began working on Internet Explorer 7 in an attempt to catch up.

“We listened to what you want” was their advertising campaign for a while. It would seem, however, that the world was shouting “We want Firefox!”. Internet Explorer 7 was a complete overhaul on 6. They introduced tabbed browsing (which Firefox already had), faster load times (which Firefox already had), more detailed error reporting (Firefox wins here again), a built in search box (I’m sure I’ve seen this before…oh yes…Firefox) and little more. The problem here came in the way Internet Explorer 7 rendered things compared to its predecessor (Internet Explorer 6) and Mozilla Firefox. For example, IE7 allowed translucent images, IE6 did not (Firefox already did, just FYI). Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create borders caused problems too. Firefox took the elements width and drew the border inside it. IE6 also did this. Could Microsoft be consistent? No. A 100px wide element with a 1px border would be 102px wide.

That“s enough ranting about Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 8 has recently been released. Once again, an entirely new rendering engine meant more problems with compatibility. They also dropped the support for translucent images in Internet Explorer 8 – I still cannot work out why. It seems they heard our “We want Firefox” shouts as they have added yet more features of Mozilla Firefox 3:

• Faster switching between open tabs (although I can say it’s nothing compared to Firefox)
• One-click bookmarking
• Intelligent address bar (searches through your history based on keywords you type)

The new feature that bugged me the most, and in fact caused me to write this, was the new Developer Tools feature of IE8.

One of the most popular add-ons for Mozilla Firefox was the Firebug add-on. It allowed developers and designers to quickly test different things to find what works best. Microsoft’s Developer Tools is an almost identical copy of Firebug, even using the same fonts and colours for display HTML source code. I get the impression Microsoft were literally scraping the barrel of features whilst crying “We cannot lose to Mozilla!” Sorry Microsoft, a quick glance at the statistics says “too little, too late.”

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