4 ms·

This is great news: It means IE8 won't be the next IE6. Of course there are a lot of users still restricted to Windows XP, but their market share is dropping fa

This is great news: It means IE8 won't be the next IE6. Of course there are a lot of users still restricted to Windows XP, but their market share is dropping fairly quickly. Of course there will always be large corporate environments where updates are much slower, but I would say these are under 10%, perhaps?

melling 15y ago
IE8 is the max for XP so until XP goes away it will be the new IE6, which is at 1% in the US. So, yes IE8 will have another decade.
- wildmXranat 15y ago
  Is IE8 really that bad with regards to standards ? That's an honest question.
  - edvinasbartkus 15y ago
    Yes. That's an honest answer.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    In 5 years it will be compared to the other browsers, just like the others are much further ahead of IE6 now. IE6 used to be a good browser, too, when it launched.
    - rplnt 15y ago
      The problem isn't good/bad. Problem is that IE6 is nonstandard.
      - wwweston 15y ago
        I'm not sure there was a browser that did standards better at the time of IE6's initial release. Maybe Opera. And in my opinion, the bigger problem with IE6 was that it was buggy -- both where it purportedly followed standards and where it had its own way of doing things, behavior often didn't match spec or had unexpected side effects. It took devs years of trying to figure out where all the bodies were buried before everybody understood how it worked.
        yuhong 15y ago
        Yea, many people forget that IE6 actually improved standard compliance over IE 5.5.
        nirvdrum 15y ago
        There's another side to it too that isn't popular, but IE was in and of itself a standard. When you own 90% of the market, whatever you do is a de facto standard. And I was pretty okay with that up until they decided to stop doing anything innovative with the browser.
  - talmand 15y ago
    It's not great. A large amount of the nice fancy stuff that makes designing a website easier and more efficient is not available. But it is a huge step up from IE6 so if a large chunk of those people suddenly find themselves at IE8 then the world will be better for it. I wish MS would go back and try to update the IE8 render engine so that it can use some of the newer standards of IE9 or even IE10.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago
    With regards to the HTML5 and CSS3 level standards that Firefox, Chrome and IE10 are going to be supporting by the end of 2012? Yes. Compared to these, the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too. it's worth looking a few years ahead if IE8 will have another decade of popularity, which isn't impossible. Even without that longevity, the hindrance of the installed base of IE7 and 8 will grow over the next couple of years. We know what IE10 will have, and roughly when, since it's part of the win8 plans.
    - dspillett 15y ago
      > the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too I would go with very slow. Faster than IE6, but not by nearly as much as more modern browsers are faster than it. DOM manipulation is very slow compared to more modern browsers (recent versions of Chrome, FF, Opera, ..., even IE9) too. DOM changes being slow is what you'll notice more with most code. As an aside: make sure you set X-UA-Compatible (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29.aspx#DCModes http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29....) otherwise you'll have no idea if people looking at your stuff in IE8 are using compatability mode or not.
      - paulirish 15y ago
        > I would go with _very_ slow. Yup. Here's a chart to put IE6 v IE8 v IE10 javascript engine into perspective: http://goo.gl/3ACqo http://goo.gl/3ACqo
        dspillett 15y ago
        I'm surprised to see that much difference between IE6 and IE8. Though IIRC the sunspider test is all javascipt processing and no DOM manipulation, so perhaps the fact I pecieve IE8 as not being that much faster may mean that its DOM layer is the bottleneck I'm experiencing. Not unlikely as I don't currently do large amounts of nmuber-crunching and text processing in anything I have to test under IE.
- dspillett 15y ago
  Not a decade for XP and IE6, but certainly more than two years. Close to a decade for IE8 potentially though. XPsp3 drops off extended support in April 2014 (see http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173 for detail) at which point it will get no new security updates unless you are a company that can afford to pay for them to be done (and if you did need to try that, it would no doubt be very expensive). It is highly unlikely that the large companies (who are the main bodies holding on to XP and IE6) will allow themselves to still be using XP or IE6 beyond that point. Unfortunately IE8 will work on Vista and 7, so I can see some corporates upgrading to IE8 and no further for now. The lifecycle lookup chart at MS (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex) doesn't list dates for IE7 or IE8. Assuming that IE8's support window is tied to Windows 7 the same way IE6 and XPsp3 were tied for support purposes (as W7 was delivered with IE8 installed), they'll be able to use IE8 under Windows 7 until 2020 (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14482 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14482) if they are stupid enough to try.
  - yuhong 15y ago
    AFAIK even IE 5.01 was supported on Win2000 SP4 until 2010!

melling 15y ago

IE8 is the max for XP so until XP goes away it will be the new IE6, which is at 1% in the US. So, yes IE8 will have another decade.

wildmXranat 15y ago
Is IE8 really that bad with regards to standards ? That's an honest question.
- edvinasbartkus 15y ago
  Yes. That's an honest answer.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  In 5 years it will be compared to the other browsers, just like the others are much further ahead of IE6 now. IE6 used to be a good browser, too, when it launched.
  - rplnt 15y ago
    The problem isn't good/bad. Problem is that IE6 is nonstandard.
    - wwweston 15y ago
      I'm not sure there was a browser that did standards better at the time of IE6's initial release. Maybe Opera. And in my opinion, the bigger problem with IE6 was that it was buggy -- both where it purportedly followed standards and where it had its own way of doing things, behavior often didn't match spec or had unexpected side effects. It took devs years of trying to figure out where all the bodies were buried before everybody understood how it worked.
      - yuhong 15y ago
        Yea, many people forget that IE6 actually improved standard compliance over IE 5.5.
        nirvdrum 15y ago
        There's another side to it too that isn't popular, but IE was in and of itself a standard. When you own 90% of the market, whatever you do is a de facto standard. And I was pretty okay with that up until they decided to stop doing anything innovative with the browser.
- talmand 15y ago
  It's not great. A large amount of the nice fancy stuff that makes designing a website easier and more efficient is not available. But it is a huge step up from IE6 so if a large chunk of those people suddenly find themselves at IE8 then the world will be better for it. I wish MS would go back and try to update the IE8 render engine so that it can use some of the newer standards of IE9 or even IE10.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago
  With regards to the HTML5 and CSS3 level standards that Firefox, Chrome and IE10 are going to be supporting by the end of 2012? Yes. Compared to these, the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too. it's worth looking a few years ahead if IE8 will have another decade of popularity, which isn't impossible. Even without that longevity, the hindrance of the installed base of IE7 and 8 will grow over the next couple of years. We know what IE10 will have, and roughly when, since it's part of the win8 plans.
  - dspillett 15y ago
    > the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too I would go with very slow. Faster than IE6, but not by nearly as much as more modern browsers are faster than it. DOM manipulation is very slow compared to more modern browsers (recent versions of Chrome, FF, Opera, ..., even IE9) too. DOM changes being slow is what you'll notice more with most code. As an aside: make sure you set X-UA-Compatible (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29.aspx#DCModes http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29....) otherwise you'll have no idea if people looking at your stuff in IE8 are using compatability mode or not.
    - paulirish 15y ago
      > I would go with _very_ slow. Yup. Here's a chart to put IE6 v IE8 v IE10 javascript engine into perspective: http://goo.gl/3ACqo http://goo.gl/3ACqo
      - dspillett 15y ago
        I'm surprised to see that much difference between IE6 and IE8. Though IIRC the sunspider test is all javascipt processing and no DOM manipulation, so perhaps the fact I pecieve IE8 as not being that much faster may mean that its DOM layer is the bottleneck I'm experiencing. Not unlikely as I don't currently do large amounts of nmuber-crunching and text processing in anything I have to test under IE.
dspillett 15y ago
Not a decade for XP and IE6, but certainly more than two years. Close to a decade for IE8 potentially though. XPsp3 drops off extended support in April 2014 (see http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173 for detail) at which point it will get no new security updates unless you are a company that can afford to pay for them to be done (and if you did need to try that, it would no doubt be very expensive). It is highly unlikely that the large companies (who are the main bodies holding on to XP and IE6) will allow themselves to still be using XP or IE6 beyond that point. Unfortunately IE8 will work on Vista and 7, so I can see some corporates upgrading to IE8 and no further for now. The lifecycle lookup chart at MS (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex) doesn't list dates for IE7 or IE8. Assuming that IE8's support window is tied to Windows 7 the same way IE6 and XPsp3 were tied for support purposes (as W7 was delivered with IE8 installed), they'll be able to use IE8 under Windows 7 until 2020 (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14482 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14482) if they are stupid enough to try.
- yuhong 15y ago
  AFAIK even IE 5.01 was supported on Win2000 SP4 until 2010!