IE8 - what's the fuss?

I had a post written up about blocking IE8. I had heard from what I believed to be a reputable source that it didn't play nice with Gmail and Yahoo mail. As I was writing the post, I downloaded it.

I thought I could be slick and load it in a way so that IE7 still worked. I was wrong. It has very few options during the installer. Also, once it starts, there's no "cancel" option.

The X in the upper right corner is grayed out as well but I've learned that shutting down a Microsoft install abruptly can be devastating, so I rolled with it.

So far, the worst thing that has happened is I had to actually read provided instructions to fix something. Apparently one of my add-ons was not ready for IE8 and the only way to make a warning bar go away telling me of that fact was to restart IE and tell it to start IE without that addon. Because I didn't read the page that opened up to tell me how to fix the problem, I spent a little time more frustrated than I needed to be.

Gmail and Yahoo mail seem to be fine. A few of my other addons are not running, but for some reason, they just rolled over and didn't cause a fuss. I'm sure most of them will get patched/upgraded in time now that IE8 is rolling out to a computer near you next week. I'm composing this post in IE8, I've gotten Windows Update to run successfully, and shortly I'm going to find out what a Web Slice is...

Maybe it's a feature in each of the mail programs that I don't use that isn't working. (I had to install a new addon for Gmail chat.) I decided to use IE8 for the rest of the weekend just to see if anything so horrible happens that I decide to stop it from rolling out at work. So far, it's not going to happen.

This week someone I work with tried to tell me that I told him not to install XP Service Pack 3. I might have told him to wait a bit in May 2008 when it first rolled out, but he had a hard time defending himself when I asked him why I would have put the installer on his desktop several months ago if I didn't want him to install it.

I'm glad now that I inadvetantly installed it. I'm not saying it's going to be my browser of choice now (still no inline spell check), but at least when it starts to roll out next week, I won't be telling people to skip it for a reason that doesn't exist.

I know at least 1% of the blog readers use IE8 already, so if you have seen any issues, let me know in the comments.

~~Code Monkey