Topic Archive: IE8

IE8 Beta 2 Released

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 @ 9:08 pm

I like it. Give me more browser improvements! With the news of Firefox 3.1's JIT JavaScript beasty TraceMonkey, is it too much to hope that IE8 Beta 2 has some similar improvements under the hood?

First you have to find the appropriate page among the 300 or so flogging IE8 Beta 2 in the MS redundaverse. Drilling down into performance, you find the terse:

...the script engine in Internet Explorer 8 is significantly faster than in previous versions, minimizing the load time for webpages based on JavaScript or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).

OK. Faster. Faster how? How much faster?

It used to be that JavaScript engines were so slow that benchmarks served mostly to show that they weren't suitable for anything serious (slow and slower). It's time for some head-to-head benchmarks. Stay tuned.

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Developer’s Notebook: Find computed styles in IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari

Brian Dillard, Monday, May 5, 2008 @ 3:58 pm

At my recent Web 2.0 Expo talk, I exhorted developers to get comfortable outside the Firebug/Firefox safety zone. By rotating between Opera, Safari and even IE as our primary development environments, we can really get to know those browsers - and perhaps learn to utilize their non-standard features. Switching things up, however, can inhibit productivity until you learn your way around each browser's tools.

To that end, I offer these step-by-step instructions for finding computed styles in all four A-grade browsers. I chose the display of computed styles as my "debuggers are cool" use case because it's an obscure but useful feature for CSS debugging. Most of the time I can debug styles by looking at my debugger's snapshot of the current cascade for a given element. But sometimes that's not enough. If I've assigned a value of "inherit" to the font-family of an element, then the cascade snapshot won't tell me what font is actually applied to that element. (Not being a designer, I often can't tell the difference between various sans-serif faces, especially at small sizes.) Luckily, computed styles can give me the information I need.

As these examples demonstrate, debugging tools have come a long way in the last couple of years. Let's make the most of them for all of our UI-layer needs.

Internet Explorer 8 and DebugBar

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IE's JavaScript debugging tools have finally matured, but its CSS ones lag behind. Even IE8, with its built-in debuggers (under Tools > Developer Tools), won't show you computed styles. Luckily, Jean-Fabrice Rabaute has crafted DebugBar, an plugin for Internet Explorer 5+ that adds all sorts of useful tools. Install DebugBar, fire up your version of IE and choose View > Toolbars > DebugBar to make the plugin visible. Then click the "DebugBar" icon in the resulting toolbar to open the DebugBar sidebar. You'll see two tabbed panes, one below the other. Choose the "DOM" tab on top and the "Comp. Style" tab on the bottom. In the upper pane, you should see a target icon with the caption "Drag target on document to find element." Drag the icon anywhere on an open web page and you'll see computed styles for the corresponding element in the bottom pane of the sidebar.

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IE8, HTML5 and Ajax Navigation: The future of Really Simple History

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 2:23 pm

Speaking of Really Simple History....

While perusing John Resig's widely discussed analysis of IE8, I was surprised by his lack of fanfare when discussing its support of HTML 5's Ajax navigation module. This is a major development in the arena of Ajax history and bookmark management.

John's comments:

HTML 5: window.location.hash

Already supported fairly well by most browsers. Modifying window.location.hash changes the page URL and adds the page to the history (allowing for back-button simulation in Ajax applications). IE went a step further and broadcasts the hashchanged event (the first browser to do so, as far as I know).

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IE8 Beta 1

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, March 7, 2008 @ 3:07 pm

Unless you've been stuck under a rock for the last week, you've probably heard about the IE8 Beta 1 release. My colleague Brian will have a post or two next week to dig under the surface and tell you what IE8 means to Ajax developers.

Technorati Tags: ajax, ie8

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