In our last poll, we asked if you felt that IE8 would fix their DOM Support? The poll was live long before the IE8 Beta 1 came out and thus nothing was known about the new version since Microsoft isn't very forthcoming with sharing a road map with developers.
Regardless, the mood of the development community was reflected in the results that came in before the beta release, and was only slightly different after developers got some first hand experiences.
Results:
Yes Completely - 4%
Not A Thing - 16%
Minor Fixes Only - 15%
Mostly Fixed - 3%
Fix Some, Break Some - 30%
I Don't Care Anymore - 5%
Don't Make Me Laugh - 27%
To be honest, most were taken back by Microsoft's commitment towards standards, and actually taking the (correct) brave step to render in Standards Mode by default.
Many of the long standing bugs DOM Bugs were fixed, although there were many that didn't see any attention at all. New features were added, but the overall UI was hardly improved upon at all (from legacy chrome/usability bugs, to the un-movable toolbar issues).
If history of IE7 development is to repeat itself, expect a few more betas for IE8, then an RC (Release Candidate), and a final RTM (Release To Market) date sometime late in Q4, 2008 or Q1, 2009 if they continue to fix ignored issues.
As noted here day 1, we promised to link into the public bug tracking systems for each browser, when and where they became available (and we certainly have done so - if you find a bug listed here that doesn't reference the IE Feedback bug number, please let us know!). When IE8 Beta 1 was released, Microsoft re-opened their "IE Feedback" site at Microsoft Connect, so that developers could view and track bugs with input from Microsoft. It isn't a full public bug tracking site, but it has been dearly missed since it was dismantled after the IE7 release, in fact one of the reasons that this Blog started! ;-)
We hope that the IE Feedback site will stay open forever (or some similar site) so that developers can continue to benefit from its presence, however when directly questioned, the response was less than an absolute yes on the IE Blog.
We wish the IE Team the best of luck on shipping IE8 with great DOM Support to an eager developer base, lets just hope we can close a bunch more issues before it is shipped out the door!
Submit a bug
Posts
