Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

 In case you didn’t hear it in mix09 keynote, IE 8.0 was RTMed today (Download). According to the benchmarks ,IE 8.0 is without any doubt, the best IE ever and we all know that there is no better browser to view SharePoint sites in than IE! 

First off, a big “Thank You” to the IE team for their fabulous efforts to improve IE 8.0 with regards to standards based compliance. That’s the first obvious thing that comes to my mind. Work with it a little bit and you know what I am talking about!

As the IE8 team claims, the IE 8.0 performance is now much better comparing to its predecessors (i.e IE 7.0), and my feeling after a few HOURS of trying it tells me the exact  same thing.

>>IE 8.0 really loads my SharePoint pages noticeably faster:

In order to test both browser’s speed response, I put them through a number of tests. I used just one computer to ensure that the tests compare just the browsers, and not the hardware or software they run on. The calculated average response time  was recorded before and after I upgraded my IE 7.0 instance to IE 8.0. Almost in all cases , I got my testing sharepoint pages loaded faster!

For example for the OOTB default.aspx page (in a publishing context) the average request and response delta was 7-8 ms faster in IE 8.0.

In IE 7.0:

In IE 8.0 :

Yeah , I know that 7 ms is trivial , but remember, this was for a plain vanilla OOTB page! In some of the pages I got to 2-3 seconds faster load time.

>>UI Elements are rendered in IE 7.0 mode by default:

>>Navigation is just plain broken in IE8 Standards Mode:

Albeit they’ve fixed many  of the UI inconsistencies since Beta 1 , so far the out of the box MOSS UI experience in IE 8.0 standards mode looks messy. Blueband master page in publishing sites is an exception as it works in both IE 7.0 and IE 8.0 modes.

OOTB  default.master page and System master page simply do NOT work in IE 8.0 mode unless Document Mode is set to Quirk.

ECB menu (and flyouts menu) don’t render properly as well:

All right people, that was a quick observation of IE 8.0 and SharePoint. I am off to bed!

Update March 20/2009: You wanna dig deeper? See Randy’s post here. While you are at it, check out this KB article too.