IE8 beta 2 initial thoughts (1 of n)
When the first beta for IE8 was announced I rushed out, downloaded it and installed it eager to see what the IE team had been up to ... Well let's just say that the beta lasted about 5 days on my machine before it was removed. The best thing about beta 1 was the uninstaller that actually removed all traces of the beta properly.
So when beta 2 of IE8 was announced last week it was with some skepticism that I hit the download link, and with even more doubt that I installed it.
My initial thoughts aren't bad, but they aren't great either! Whilst (so far) it seems more stable than the first beta there are still some things that are pesky and annoying at best, and others that simply make the product unusable and are coercing me to try and see if the uninstaller for the second beta is as good as the first was.
Firstly, it's VERY aggressive use of resources drives me bonkers! I like tabbed browsers as I can fire up tabs in the background and let them load peacefully and read them when i get around to it. Well, lemme rephrase that, I like tabbed browsing when using firefox, opera, or safari, but NOT when using IE. (and yes I am running them all to compare 1 browser to another, comparing apples with apples if you like). The reason being is the IE8 just kills my machine when opening more than 1 tab. I know sometimes I can get carried away having as many as 20+ tabs open, but firefox (my current browser of choice) handles this just fine. IE8 beta 2 doesn't! In fact any more than 3 tabs and you're starting to ask for trouble.
This shows a screenshot from this morning; with a mere 11 tabs open 
321 Meg being consumed by iexplore!?!?! That's a little extreme guys ... i mean come on! That's more than 30 meg per tab! Does IE simply fire up a new "instance" of itself per tab?
Here's a comparison between IE and Firefox with the exact same tabs open, notice the difference ...
Firefox here is using only 80Meg vs IE's massive 225! That's a difference of close to 300%. Ridiculous if you ask me.
Aside from the annoying aggressive use of my system resources some other quirky things bug me about IE; like the silly green color of the tabs. What's this about? At first i thought it was an attempt to indicate unread vs read tabs like Firefox does via a few nice addins, but alas no. There appears to be no way to remove the pesky green color.
Compare this again to the stock standard Firefox way ...
the inactive tabs appear in a darker grey and the active tab appears with a lighter background color as well as the close button highlighting nicely so at a glance you can see which is the active tab. This is the stock standard firefox behavior, adding some nice tab add-ins can get you a much more custom experience.
So thus far my feelings on IE8 aren't great!
I'd love to hear what others out there think of the browser.
Next time I will focus more on the features of the product from a developers point of view and will touch on things like standards compliance etc. So watch this space.