Metropol

As you may now IE8 Beta 2 came out today. It has a number of rather nice features, about half of which are copied from other browsers like Safari and Firefox, and half of which are completely new additions of its own.

For one thing it has inline search, which is really about time; however more excitingly it has In Private browsing which allows history to be disabled for a short period of time. This will be useful when IE8 becomes ubiquitous and you want to browse on someone else's computer. It's also done a similar version of the Firefox address bar, although with a few improvements, for one thing you can click an "X" button to instantly remove incorrect entries.

Also delete browsing history has a nice feature that keeps the Cookies for sites in your favourites, and why no other browser had decided to do that I have no idea but it's completely useful - nay, essential.

Another very nice feature is that if a plugin on a page causes that page to crash, only that tab is lost. Actually IE8 has that over other browsers since every other browser I have used goes down entirely if one tab dies.

An extremely nice feature is that if you open a background tab from a page, those tabs are colour coded by domain. This is one of those features that makes you wonder why no-one had thought of it. It's not like the Firefox extension which colours tabs randomly. As a bonus, those sites are grouped together in the list. And a tab that isn't related to another just gets the standard colour so there's clear separation. Brilliant, IMO. And "Recently Closed Tabs" is very nice, as is Ctrl+K to duplicate the current tab in the background, I am not sure how I lived without that.

"Re-open last browsing session", wihout having to request that first (just as an item in Tools), is absoultely lovely, because for one thing it means I can turn off that infernal "Close all tabs!?!??" prompt since my session is easily restorable, as well as just being convenient. The whole page restoring business is really good actaully, a huge improvement as it includes your page history and so on with the restored page.

The new search bar is awesome, it displays a tooltip with differnet serach engine icons accessibly with the arrow keys, and has Firefox-esque Google Suggest suggestions, and it also searches the browser History. It even offers little pictures for certain types of serach. And while we're at it, the right-click search accelerators are excellent.

Annoyingly most sites (including Metropol) don't render properly in IE8 Standards mode. The Compatibility Mode button has to be pressed for that site. But at least it doesnt' require a browser restart, and it remembers that the site needs compatibility. With any luck websites will correct this before the final edition is out. The Page Zooming feature is hugely improved as well, in all sorts of ways - more accurate.

Suggested sites - in the address bar and also in Favorites - is also quite fun to play with, and it should be quite reliable as it collects data from everyone using IE8. The "People who liked X also liked Y" idea is well known by Amazon, but it really should apply to browsers too - built in and professional, not like that ghastly StumbleUpon extension.

Anyway, definitely try it out!

You're wrong cdd, most things in Firefox are copied from Opera.

Have they fixed the unfortunate design decision for IE7 which saw Cleartype disabled on elements which used DXImageTransform filters, yet? That was a poor fix for what should have been avoidable if IE just rendered text after drawing the filter. Not that I'm a great defender of more proprietary attributes, but its gradient filter has been useful for a site I'm working on atm.

lukey wrote:Have they fixed the unfortunate design decision for IE7 which saw Cleartype disabled on elements which used DXImageTransform filters, yet? That was a poor fix for what should have been avoidable if IE just rendered text after drawing the filter. Not that I'm a great defender of more proprietary attributes, but its gradient filter has been useful for a site I'm working on atm.

Sadly not... BTW, I was overzealous in saying Metropol didn't work properly in IE8 Standards mode, it's only the Posting page that comes out weirdly in standards view.

I've been noticing more and more nice features, such as the New Tab page actaully saying useful things instead of crap about how you've opened a new tab. Also, when the Inline Find dialog doesn't work (such as in Help CHM files or HTA applications), they have also redesigned the Find dialog. And also, Downloads are checked against the SmartScreen filter, which I think is very good. I must try downloading some spyware now. The developer tools that display on hitting F12 are really good too, nesting every element in a hierarchy. "AutoDelete History on Exit" is also invaluable. And "Show Stop and Refresh Before Address Bar" is very pleasant. Ctrl+Enter to go straight to the URL top hit is very nice and Ctrl+Click to auto select text and display the activities dialog is a thoughtful addition.

But is it still typically IE?

cdd wrote:BTW, I was overzealous in saying Metropol didn't work properly in IE8 Standards mode, it's only the Posting page that comes out weirdly in standards view.

I've just done a lovely fresh reformat so I'm certainly not sticking IE8 on here yet. I'll see about getting a VM with it next week. As for the posting page, IIRC I didn't change it much from the default so it might be a phpbb isue rather than with me. And if it's standards mode is having trouble with *my* coding then we know something is wrong.

If it's phpBB I'd expect they'll release a new template soon enough, I need to bring this theme up to date with the latest templates anyhow. Not that this is of any interest to anyone, but in the traditions of Media Websites one must detail every boring little change one does to their site.

Ah well, here's a the ones found so far!

Metropol IE8 issues:

Large space between text entry box and icons above (Bold etc) on new post page.

Unable to click on page numbers.

Having installed IE8 (on VMware, I'm not messing up my nice machine) I notice the issue with the posting page but can't find the problem with the page numbers.

Posting page issues is likely to be a minor bug or a fault with the main template, I'll see what I can do when I revamp the templates nearer the time of final release.

Other than that, once again not impressed, its rendering and responsiveness are still pathetic compared to Firefox/Safari and it still feels far less stable and robust compared to them.

The page numbers issue only occurs on some page numbers, and also only occurs on the index page. Those page numbers are clickable, but only on the border.

In the meantime you can simply add: Which forces IE legacy rendering.

that goes against all my principles.