When will you switch to IE8?

Question

Microsoft announced the official release of IE8 today.

Although users will now be able to "disable" IE8, like previous versions, it will not co-exist with earlier versions.

I develop web pages, modest as they are, and Internet Explorer gives me more trouble than any other web browser that I test with.

I am shocked, floored, that IE6, nominated by some as one of the worst technological products ever, still has a 20% market share! Still, Microsoft is losing market share faster than Chrysler is losing money.

My question is this - if you develop web pages, when will you replace IE7 with IE8 on your windows machine as the default IE browser?

My answer - not until IE8 has a bigger market share than IE6, which I don't concern myself with anymore. What's the point?

Answer 1

If I'm developing 'customer/public' facing sites I should have done so already.

If I'm developing 'corporate/intranet' sites then whenever the corporate in question wants the site in question to work on IE8.

Answer 2

IE6 really isn't the worst technological product ever by any standards. The issue here is that it's outdated beyond comparison, and should have been retired back in 2003 or 2004.

I'm not really sure when I'll start using it as my default IE browser, but I'm really hopeful that it will be quickly adopted. My instinct tells me that it will probably almost eradicate IE7 from the market, but that the old IE6 users won't update this time either. :/

Answer 3

For now ie8 for web developers mean that they will need to test out their sites on 3 different ie browsers: 6-7-8. And since you will need virtual machine for doing so, it doesn't matter which ie browser you have on your machine.

God, i hope that IE 6 will die really soon now :|

P.s. of course i'm supposing that you are using firefox for developing and anyway you are not using IE for surfing :)

Edit: Actually i take my words back (well, part of it. Ie6 should still die). In IE8 it's very nice to have ala firebug development mode, gives huge hand in debugging IE crazyness.

So now i would say that you should upgrade IE asap and use it for IE related debugging. And use Firefox for everything else :)

Answer 4

Never. I'm with FireFox and Opera.

EDIT: I suppose Microsoft trolls downvoting me response? ;)

Answer 5

I have allready switched to IE8 RC and it works fine.

If you need to test how pages look in older versions use the new SuperPreview tool.

Answer 6

Since IE8 is able to imitate IE7 rendering (Compatibility mode), I have already installed it (RC). There is nothing to lose when you change from IE7. Moreover, IE8 has much faster JavaScript and some other improvements (also some developer tools).

And if you want to test your html in older IE versions, you should definitely try IETester.

Answer 7

When (1) it has 20+% market share (2) there is a 8.x bug fix release.

Answer 8

When h**l freezes over seems to be the story here in IE6 territories.

Answer 9

There's not much point as you said it. Because I expect big problems to appear in IE6 in advance and I know alot of people don't bother to use anything else, I do test early on (checking to see if a concept will work). Since I don't expect much problems with IE7 and IE8 I don't test in them except before a release. Mostly because it's a pain to fire up virtualization software to test every 2 lines of js or css.

As for usage I'm attached to firefox. Because of the plugins. Even if I wasn't there are better alternatives than IE7/8.

Answer 10

Now that IE8 is officially released then sometime in the next week, just to allow any immediate issues to settle down, but it's more complex than that.

At the moment I run two development machines - one on Vista with IE7 and Firefox installed and one with Ubuntu 8.10 with Opera and Firefox. Opera is my default personal browser. I also have a MacBook with Parallels installed running Windows XP, so that covers IE6 and Safari. For sites where it matters (and most of my work is internally facing so it doesn't) they are tested on all of the above.

Now that IE8 is out I'll upgrade the Vista box to that and the XP virtual to IE7, and I'll most likely abandon IE6 unless the client insists on it.

Answer 11

I'm disappointed that IE8 doesn't support new Javascript features like list comprehensions and generators. Shame on you, Microsoft!

Answer 12

My experience with RC1 has scared me off totally. IE8 appears to be total rubbish at present:

• Certain sites cause the application to crash (Twitter and quite often SO)
• Page loads can take ages on some sites.
• Crashes a lot and keeps restoring and crashing again (watch out those with epilepsy).
• Compatability mode does not replicate IE7 performance (which would be my assumption).
• Did I mention it crashes a lot?

Plus points

• Accelerators are kind of cool when they work, but not worth the pain of the overall experience.

I have held on to IE as my favoured browser through all the criticisms of the past, but I'm pretty sure IE8 has driven me to Firefox forever.

Answer 13

if you develop web pages, when will you replace IE7 with IE8 on your windows machine as the default IE browser?

ASAP. You need to test on it, and you do at least get IE7 Compatibility Mode to play with in IE8. Of course it's not quite exactly the same, but you already need a virtual machine to run IE6 in, so what's another virtual machine for IE7? If you are managing to get away without making sites work on IE6 then good for you, but that's far from typical in the industry today.

It's my personal feeling that the way the ‘compatibility mode button’ and the website compatibility lists have been handled is an unmitigated disaster for all parties and the extra complexity for the user will result in irritation and slow takeup for IE8. But still, it's IE, and you're going to have to live with it.

FWIW, IE6 doesn't deserve the “worst tech products” listing. IE6 was a big leap forward when it was launched: it succeeded the nasty IE5.5, and had little competition from the alternative browsers. This was back before Firefox, when all we had was incomplete Mozilla suite ‘milestone releases’ and wonky old versions of Opera. The real problem for IE6 was just that there was no update to it for years, as the alternative browsers raced ahead.

Of course this whole laughable situation with having to choose one particular version of the browser to run, and the multiple-IE hacks, and SuperPreview, and multiple backwards compatibility modes bloating up the browser is all down to Microsoft's original lamentable decision that The Browser Is Part Of The OS.

If we still had a simple standalone browser we'd all be fine; web authors wouldn't need the pain of virtual machines or the unreliability of the multiple-IE hacks, and Microsoft could fix whatever bugs they liked, safe in the knowledge that anyone with intranet apps broken by the fix could just carry on using the old version in parallel with the new.

It may have helped them win the browser war, but the extra coupling baggage caused by this decision is an ever-heavier cross for IE's back.

Answer 14

RC1 had some serious problems, and compatibility mode doesn't always work. I'll wait for the early adopters to find all the problems first.

Answer 15

I support IE8 now, although my user base isn't huge.

The final version will be out shortly, so best to bite the bullet soon and support it. Alot of Windows users will upgrade as soon as it is released, some without even knowing (IT staff updates for them, for example).

Answer 16

As soon as Internet Explorer 8 has a non-trivial market share, then I will begin testing applications in it. I don't plan to use it as my everyday browser (not that there's anything wrong with that ;)).

By non-trivial I mean, as soon as it isn't just beta testers. Even a 1% market share, in web terms, is a huge number of people.

Note: Don't stop testing on IE7 as soon as IE8 is out! IE7 will be the 100lb gorilla for a long time yet.

Answer 17

If you develop web pages commercially then you need to state which browsers & versions you support and test for those versions appropriately; that list will have to include IE8 at some point soon.

The biggest PITA with IE has always been its insistence on a single-version installation per machine, making it very difficult to test for more than one version of IE without resorting to VMs.

They showed the beta of Expression Blend 3 at Mix09 yesterday with a feature called SuperPreview that allows the side-by-side comparison of content in different browsers AND versions of browsers (e.g. IE6, IE7, IE8) - but that is merely the rendering - from what I can make out, although you can inspect the HTML/CSS I don't think you can test scripting.

Answer 18

"When will you switch to IE8?"

No way Jose. Opera :-).

Answer 19

on my home PC never!!!! at work asap :(

Answer 20

On my home PC as "ASAP" in my development machine, i'm still working with IE6 only... so sad :(

Answer 21

When IE8Pro is released.

Answer 22

Since most of our customers use IE, our website is keyed to IE and I must use IE for testing. My answer to that is to use SlimBrowser for the IE interface since it takes out much of the IE garbage and still renders as IE. (It uses the IE engine) I never get any MS software until there is at least one service pack. The buggier it is the more I wait. Yes, I have IE, Firefox, Opera & Safari on my desktop.