on download and users numbers
I just ran across a blog post claiming that IE 8 beta 1 with its 2 million downloads was doing better than Firefox 3 pre-releases which are being used by more than 2 million people every day. Not a big deal, but in case anyone was thinking anything like that, it's wrong. 2 million downloads does not mean 2 million daily users and certainly not the case with IE8 beta 1 which is pretty much unusable as a daily browser. Firefox 3 pre-releases, on the other hand, have been downloaded nearly 10 million times (not counting updates between betas) and Firefox 3 is being used by enough people that it's about to break 1% of global web usage.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
I can confirm that IE8 beta 1 breaks a lot of sites due to regressions in the rendering engine (nothing to do with standards), that do as you mention make it unusable as a daily browser.
It is currently only usable by developers to test out sites/applications to see th e impact of their new "follow standards-rendering by default" strategy. (which is of course ***highly*** desired by the development community.
Of particular note, valign on table cells in IE8 is completely broken, and the "fixes" for .getElementById, and .setAttribute() are only partially fixed.
Fieldsets are very broken in IE8 currently, and a nasty link/scroll jumping regression bug makes the browser painful to use for more than 10 minutes.
Firefox 3 on the other hand... is pretty swell! (I had some issues using/editing in Blogger) and a CSS opacity issue with solid blocks floating over other semi-transparent blocks "accidentally-inheriting" the semi-transparency, but otherwise seems pretty rock-solid.
Posted by: Steve | June 4, 2008 1:51 PM
@steve: did you enter bugs about those issues ? If simple to fix, they might make it into 3.0.1, or else then in 3.1 which should come at end of this year (if I am correct).
Posted by: jmdesp | June 4, 2008 2:33 PM