IE8 continues to show up in browser stats, especially outside of the bubble of the Western world. Browser stats have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but current estimates for IE8 usage worldwide are around 0.
The lower end of the estimate comes from w3counter :. It estimates global IE8 desktop browser proportion to be around 0. I suspected we might see higher IE8 usage in certain geographical regions, so drilled into the data by continent. I looked more closely into the Asian stats, noting the proportion of IE8 usage for each country.
Yes — even in ! Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience. Is it really such a surprise that there are still people around the world who are clinging to IE8? I decided to put myself in the shoes of one of these anonymous souls, and browse the web for a day using IE8. You can play along at home! Hmm, okay. Looks like the default web page pulled up by IE8 no longer exists.
Well, that figures. Microsoft has officially stopped supporting IE8 so why should it make sure the IE8 landing page still works? I tried searching for something:. The logo, for instance, is zoomed in and cropped. To enable HTML5 markup, you have to explicitly tell the browser these elements exist.
They can then be styled as normal:. That is wrapped in an IE conditional , by the way. So I go about trying to set up a new one. One way you can get around this is to use Sass to generate two stylesheets; one for modern browsers, and one for legacy IE. There were a few differences between how it looked in IE8 and a modern browser:. Whilst promising at first sight, the form was quite buggy to fill in. Then I noticed the little yellow warning symbol at the bottom left of my IE window.
I clicked it and saw that it was complaining about a JS error:. I was beginning to worry that email might be off-limits for a ten-year-old browser.
But when I went to Hotmail, the signup form looked OK — so far so good:. The only quirky thing on the form was some slightly buggy label positioning, but the signup was otherwise seamless:.
The leftmost input should have been my first name, not my surname. This shows the importance of accessible markup — even without CSS and visual association, I could determine exactly which input box applied to which label albeit the second time around!
Anyhow, I was able to complete the sign-up process and was redirected to the MSN homepage, which rendered great. This is a clever fallback tactic, as Facebook need to support a large global audience on low-end mobile devices, so need to provide a basic version of Facebook anyway.
Why not offer that same baseline of experience to older desktop browsers? I tried signing up and was able to make an account.
Oddly, Twitter is happy for you to log in, but not for you to register in the first place. I felt awkward about logging in with my existing Twitter account. It's safe for many people to ignore these figures though, as for day-to-day tasks, the vast majority of users will find it to be a perfectly responsive browser. Unless you're using a netbook.
IE 8 splits individual tabs into their own processes, a la Chrome. This means a Web page can crash without taking the browser and all other open tabs with it, and it works really well.
But it also gobbles system resources. On a netbook with limited memory, this could be an issue -- an issue perhaps best solved by installing Opera instead. New security features have made IE 8 far more secure, and shove a big fat cake of reassurance into the paranoid mouths of Mr and Mrs Scared O'Computers. InPrivate browsing lets you browse sensitive sites without usernames, passwords, browsing history and cookies being saved by the browser.
It's also now possible to stop private data being sent discretely to sites that collect such information -- such as display ad-serving services -- by using InPrivate Filtering. You can just block a Web site from seeing your data by adding its domain to a list within IE 8's settings. A threat known as cross-site scripting, which can be used by hackers to steal private data even if the Web page looks completely legitimate, is looked out for in real-time in IE 8, and is offered a swift and painful axe to the face before your private data is passed on.
The search box in the top right-hand corner of IE 8 now delivers real-time search results. Providers need to write their search plugins to support this, but it means as you type a Wikipedia search, suggestions appear in real-time underneath, complete with thumbnail images, rather than just plain text.
As we noted when we got our first peek at the new IE8 last year, some of its new features broke new ground in the browser race, but most of them were attempts to catch up to innovations made by Microsoft's competitors — search in the location bar, smart RSS handling and easy-to-understand security protections. But IE still attracts the lion's share of mainstream web users, thanks to the fact it comes bundled with Windows. And for those users, IE8 should improve their experience interacting with web apps, RSS and all of the other tech more-advanced users consider second nature.
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Senior Editor Twitter. Topics Browsers. Effective January 12, , Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported on numerous version of Windows, due to new policies specifying that only the newest version of IE available for a supported version of Windows will be supported.
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