Chad#

When I was at MIX09 they announced the official release of IE8 which was kind of expected.  I thought I’d reformat my my machine back to Vista so I could give it a fair try (can’t upgrade to IE8 RTW under Windows 7).  So I went about and installed it and I’ll be honest, I love it.  It’s fast for a browser from the Internet Explorer brand.  I could go on for a while describing while I think it’s great but to be honest I think it’s currently at where it should be and I hope the next version of IE will finally raise the bar for browsers.

While at MIX I had a lot of talks with Scott Hanselman about accessibility because I have very poor eyesight.  One of the features he mentioned I would love is the full page zoom in IE8.  Well, to be honest Firefox already does this and is one of the main reasons Firefox is my default browser.  I noticed about 4 minutes into using it that when you select a full page zoom level it is selected as IE8’s global setting and cannot be set on a site by site basis.  I like to zoom different pages differently depending on things like text size, whether to not they overflow and create a horizontal scroll bar and if they get distorted by zooming.

The only other reason I’m really not using IE8 as my default browser full time is due to the fact that I can’t get a full fledge firebug under IE8.  Now I know, I know there is the developer tools tool that comes with IE8 but it’s missing the net tab.  Other than that I’d say it’s almost more feature-rich than Firebug.

The IE8 team did a fantastic job with bringing the quality of IE up with the rest of the other browsers out there.  I hope that with vNext they can add at least one of the two features I’m looking for.  If they added the site by site zoom setting I would probably use it as my default browsing browser(hah).