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Microsoft has finally made Internet Explorer 8 Beta publicly available for download, and all I can say is: WTF?

First of all, IE8 can only be installed in Windows Vista SP1, XP SP2, 2008 Server, and 2003 Server SP2. Which leads me to think that this is nothing more than a business ploy to get people to upgrade their *cough* legal *cough* Microsoft OS.

Next, what happened to passing the ACID2 test? After bragging about this milestone months ago, it is still failing for some. The exact reason is still unclear, but this inconsistency is disappointing nonetheless.

Third, what about SVG support? The web community has been stuck with raster formats LONG ENOUGH! How much longer must we wait until we arrive at a standardized vector format?

Finally, let’s look at IE8’s “new and exciting” features:

Activities

Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another.

Kind of cool, but plugins / extensions / add-ons in Firefox do the trick just fine.

WebSlices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Again, sort of cool. I am all for microformats, but RSS feeds are already a standard across all modern browsers in different platforms including mobile, so I doubt web developers will want to develop widgets that will only work on IE8.

Every “feature” listed after Webslices is basically pointless or a replication of a Firefox, Safari, or Opera feature. It’s sort of like the marketing team had to try very hard to come up with something to sell IE8 with. Nothing “new” or “exciting” here.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8.

So basically, the team spent countless hours designing a new favorites bar that looks just like every other favorites / bookmarks toolbar and added a new menu item that saves favorites directly into the bar and called it a new feature.

This feature, for one, has really left me speechless.

Next!

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Finally IE8 gets a feature that has been in Firefox for AGES! I guess this is their way of admitting that their browser crashes all to often.

P.S. How long did the designers come up with such a cool name as “Automatic Crash Recovery”? If I were them I’d try to trademark that before someone else does.

Improved Phishing Filter

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

I can’t believe this made it to the “New and Exciting Features” list. The marketing team is really on a roll.

Activities, WebSlices, Favorites Bar, Automatic Crash Recovery, and now Safety Filter? What’s next, the Super Cool Browsing History Manager? Seriously who comes up with these names?! While renaming Phishing Filter to Safety Filter would prevent Grandpa Joe from getting a migraine while trying to imagine why he must bring a filter the next time he goes fishing, I must say that this only leads to more confusion.

It would have been much more intuitive if the Phishing Filter were moved as an option below the Security Filter, because the Security Filter does so much more than prevent phishing attacks. For one, there’s the group policy option for blocking unsafe sites, and two … well that’s just about it.

That’s really just about everything that there is with the new IE8 Beta. If this is any indication of what the final product is going to look like, then I guess we are better off without it. As far as web developers are concerned, it’s just another browser to produce hacks for. Speaking of looks, it looks exactly the same as IE7. At least the Mozilla Firefox team made the effort to come up with a new look in Firefox 3.

On a serious note, hard core developers may wish to take a look at the IE8 Beta 1 Whitepapers, which as of today appears to be central to a single new feature: Better AJAX Development. Hooray. Yeah I know I said this was a serious note. But really guys, WTF?

The Google Chart API allows you to easily create dynamic, professional-looking image (PNG format) charts with very little programming. Data can be encoded to provide up to 62 (with simple encoding), 1,000 (with text encoding), or 4096 (with extended encoding) different values.

Choose from a variety of charting styles including:

Line chars

Bar charts

Pie charts (2D and 3D styles available)

Venn diagrams

and

Scatter plots

Not only is the chart API is free to use, the best part is that it doesn’t come with advertisements. No, not even a Google logo gets embedded in the chart, though as far as I know this is the first of its kind to offer such a service, so there is really nothing out there to compare it to. So why are they offering such a great service — one that obviously consumes a lot of bandwidth — for free? I’m not part of Google, but I’m sure this is part of their grand scheme of taking over the world. In a good way, of course.

I personally am not a big fan of frameworks, but if you work with a team enforcing frameworks is a good way of getting things done consistently and getting everyone up to par when it comes to CSS standards. This article highlights the pros and cons of using frameworks, and is a good reference for the top CSS frameworks available on the net.

I have been contemplating on writing a similar tutorial, but web designer wall beat me to it. It’s a very well written article, so be sure to check it out. You can also check out the demo here.

Need a calendar date picker for your web application? Calendar is a JavaScript class that automagically creates a graphical calendar date picker for your date fields. The sample calendars are gorgeous, complete with drop shadows and drag and drop capability. The experimental calendar even features a graphic that changes every month — much like a real-life calendar would have.

It uses the Mootols JavaScript library. It is very flexible and customizable and comes complete with documentation.

CSS sprites are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site. Images are combined into one larger image at defined X and Y coorindates. Having assigned this generated image to relevant page elements the background-position CSS property can then be used to shift the visible area to the required component image.

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CoolTips replaces regular browser tooltips with fully stylable tool tips. It uses lightweight and unobtrusive JavaScript to replace conventional web-browser tooltips.

CoolTips automagically gets contents from the title attribute by utilizing the Prototype JavaScript framework. It uses script.aculo.us for animation. Both frameworks will need to be initialized to for it to work.

Link: CoolTips homepage

CSSType is a web-based, JavaScript powered tool to automagically create CSS code for specific text formatting values such as word spacing, line height, letter spacing, and many more.
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Nothing can be more disappointing than discovering that all those hours you spent laboriously getting your website to display properly on Firefox and IE7 does not work on IE6. As developers we definitely need to have IE6 and IE7 running side by side on the same machine. That’s how I discovered Multiple IE.
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This problem has been around for ages, but it is an easy one to overlook. Internet Explorer does not expand the ' entity (part of XHTML 1.0 specifications) since it is an XML entity. So be very careful especially when using an HTML editor and use ' instead.

Here’s an example: