Greetings! I posted a negative comment a few days ago after downloading IE 8.
I found it frustratingly uncooperative, to put it mildly, so I went back to
IE 7. In the meantime, I read and listened to all the various opinions,
comments, reviews, etc., regarding the product, and made some notes of the
tons of advice (access without the add-ins, do this, do that, don't do that,
etc.).

It is conclusive that IE8 is a dud, and this makes one wonder if by mistake
the file made available for download is an alpha. It's possible? Detroit is
not the only U.S. company that produces low quality merchantise, esp. on
Fridays, just before quitting time.

What is so disappointing is that the MPVs on these forums defend the
product, and surely they must know all the problems it is causing multitudes
of people. Sure, it may work on some systems, but it's unacceptable to offer
a product that doesn't work on many others. I realize this may sound like
another tedious anti-MS rant, but I have many MS products (Office, etc.), and
don't want the company to fail, but this sloppiness should be condemned
loudly and forthrightly.

FWIW, I downloaded IE 8 and am quite satisfied with it.

"Paul Smith" <paul@nospam.windowsresource.net> wrote in message
news:eCo6D2VrJHA.1212@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> Hello Rebecca.
>
> Only people who have problems post to the newsgroups. You're not going to
> have my mum on here saying everything is fine. If you go on the Firefox
> forums, you'll find the exact same thing, or pretty much any other
> product. In fact the Firefox 3 uproar was a lot louder than this.
>
> In fact out of the dozen or so real life people, most of which family I've
> asked to upgrade last week I've not heard one complaint, I had one
> question on how to turn the Favourites bar off, and that's it.
>
> In my opinion Microsoft bent over backwards on this release to try and
> limit the damage due to 3rd parties dragging their feet.
>
> Back in the end of 2007 they said they were going to have a decent CSS 2.1
> renderer, which naturally would impact website compatibility for those
> sites that were using IE specific hacks, without bothering to check the
> version of IE and feeding it non-standard code. So they were going to
> make the standard CSS 2.1 renderer an opt-in for web developers.
>
> That solves the compatibility problem. However the web community
> (including myself) forced Microsoft to make the standards renderer the
> default, requiring all existing websites to opt-in for the old
> non-standards renderer.
>
> No problem right? Everyone had a good 12 months to update their websites,
> either by inserting one line of code asking for the old renderer (30
> seconds worth of work), or by sending standard CSS 2.1 to IE8. After all
> this benefits the website developers immensely because we no longer need
> to worry about writing pages to specific browsers, we can just write to
> the standard. What happens? Thousands of websites sit and do nothing.
>
> The IE team bend over backwards and try and do something about it, by
> putting together a list of websites that don't work, so they can tell IE8
> themselves to display them with the old renderer. Largely solves the
> problem, which isn't even theirs to solve, and worse means all those web
> developers will take even longer to fix their websites.
>
> Nowadays of course people just blame Microsoft, and certainly in a large
> number of cases wrongly. 10 years ago if there was a website that
> wouldn't display in Netscape or IE3 you'd e-mail the website owner and
> tell them their website was broken. 10 years ago if a browser plug-in
> made the browser crash or run slow, you'd e-mail the plug-in developer and
> tell them that their plug-in is broken.
>
> The real trouble lies in 3rd parties being reactive, and not pro-active.
> Microsoft could have kept IE8 in beta for an extra year, and these issues
> would still exist, not because of anything Microsoft did or didn't do, but
> because website, or plug-in developers would just throw out the same
> statement "we don't support beta products", as if they're not even going
> to look at it until it comes out and their users are having problems with
> it.
>
> 12 months ago, my websites were all tested against IE8, any issues were
> fixed. I didn't want my users to have any problems when they upgrade to
> the new browser. Not everyone thinks like that however, they just want to
> blame somebody else for issues they themselves cause by being reactive and
> not pro-active.
>
> In 6 months time many of the people who have uninstalled IE8, will install
> it again. And whatever problems they're facing will be gone. It will be
> tempting to say Microsoft fixed IE8, when in fact they downloaded the very
> same installer, with the very same version of IE8 they had 6 months prior.
> The difference is everyone else got around to actually doing their job,
> not sitting on their backside.
>
> --
> Paul Smith,
> Yeovil, UK.
> Microsoft MVP Windows Desktop Experience.
> http://www.dasmirnov.net/
>
>
> "Rebecca" <Rebecca@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:7733C9E3-48F9-4373-9700-211C805A112C@microsoft.com...
>> Greetings! I posted a negative comment a few days ago after downloading
>> IE 8.
>> I found it frustratingly uncooperative, to put it mildly, so I went back
>> to
>> IE 7. In the meantime, I read and listened to all the various opinions,
>> comments, reviews, etc., regarding the product, and made some notes of
>> the
>> tons of advice (access without the add-ins, do this, do that, don't do
>> that,
>> etc.).
>>
>> It is conclusive that IE8 is a dud, and this makes one wonder if by
>> mistake
>> the file made available for download is an alpha. It's possible? Detroit
>> is
>> not the only U.S. company that produces low quality merchantise, esp. on
>> Fridays, just before quitting time.
>>
>> What is so disappointing is that the MPVs on these forums defend the
>> product, and surely they must know all the problems it is causing
>> multitudes
>> of people. Sure, it may work on some systems, but it's unacceptable to
>> offer
>> a product that doesn't work on many others. I realize this may sound like
>> another tedious anti-MS rant, but I have many MS products (Office, etc.),
>> and
>> don't want the company to fail, but this sloppiness should be condemned
>> loudly and forthrightly.
>>

Wow rebecca, you stole the words out of my mouth

look people, i am not some excited little browser fan boy
i am 38 and been programming for the last 23 years (yes!)
i would be ashamed to release a product like that to my clients

i tried the beta, it didn't work, i uninstalled and was ok with it
but this is the final product
and it sometimes fails to connect!
please don't tell me it's my machine as chrome and FF work just fine
and even the user agent string reports in the post platform section that it
is IE 6.0 on XP!!!!! what ??????

shame on you
i actually like microsoft, and hate all the negative hype against microsoft
but vista was a shame, and IE 8.0 follows....
as a previous project manager, i never released such a bad version to my
clients
also no errors in the even log .. what kind of programmers are you ?
it fails to load... ghets stuch on connecting and nothing in the log ?

really bad