IE8 Immune to Rails Bug | The Coffeehouse

JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

As much as the marketing department, and much of the C9 peanut gallery, loves to pump and dump IE. It is good to see some real world impact made by the hardening of IE8. In this article on Arstechnica, they cite the XSS filter blocking a vulnerability surfaced in the Ruby on Rails framework.

joechung

Most IE hate is targeted towards older versions (especially IE 6). IE 8 is quite good, a big step forward from IE 6 and 7. I have high hopes for IE 9 closing the performance gap.

algorith

IE8 is pretty safe and stable nowadays, the main problem with IE now is speed. IE takes so long to open up compared to Chrome.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to algorith

#Sep 4th @ 5:54 PM

Really? Startup speed is the last of my concerns with IE8. It starts MUCH faster than Safari and about the same speed as Chrome...

spivonious

In reply to PaoloM

#Sep 4th @ 8:09 PM

Startup speed with IE8 is noticeably slower than Chrome and Opera. It'sabout the same as Firefox with no add-ons.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to spivonious

#Sep 4th @ 8:10 PM

What is your setup? On both my netbook and my desktop machine I consistently have Chrome and Safari slwoer than IE8 in startup speed (Safari dramatically so).

JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

In reply to PaoloM

#Sep 4th @ 8:15 PM

I've noticed that if I place an application shortcut on my tastbar, the application will launch must faster.

Although I have not read about this or ran empirical tests to prove it, I have to imagine that the designers of Windows7 must have placed special significance on those apps, giving them higher priority in the cacheing scheme.

BitFlipper

I noticed the following issues with IE8:

1) Sometimes when I middle-click on a link, it opens the new tab, but says it can't connect. If I then do a Refresh, the page loads properly.

2) Tabs would sometimes just "crash" out of the blue, after which the tab would re-open, and the popup balloon will show that they are being "recovered", or whatever. This even happens to tabs that are not the currently selected tab. Out of the blue.

3) Tabs would somethimes take 15 to 30 seconds to open. I have seen others complain about this too.

So when is IE9 to be expected, and is the focus really on speed this time (and hopefully also more standards-compliance as well as bug fixes)?

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

In reply to BitFlipper

#Sep 5th @ 10:18 AM

I've found IE startup to be slow when you have it configured to autodetect network proxies. If you're at home without a proxy disable that and startup is faster.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to JoshRoss

#Sep 5th @ 8:38 AM

There is no special case for shortcuts on the taskbar. What you see is probably placebo effect or that you just use those apps more (and so all the caching mechanisms are full on).

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to blowdart

#Sep 5th @ 10:49 AM

Opening a tab is still very slow, unusable

contextfree

In reply to BitFlipper

#Sep 5th @ 10:18 AM

I haven't encountered any of those problems -- it seems pretty good to me in most performance respects, better than Firefox anyway -- but what I have seen is that the Ctrl-F "find" function is very slow on large-ish pages.

androidi

In reply to joechung

#Sep 4th @ 5:07 PM

Indeed. For example try scrolling the channel 9 home/front page with IE8 and Opera using the scroll bar (left click drag). The top third of the page g o e s l i ke t h i s in IE8 where as in Opera it's completely smooth.

joechung

In reply to androidi

#Sep 5th @ 5:26 PM

Hmm, I don't have that problem. I've seen the tab problem BitFlipper mentioned, but usually it's some poorly coded rich media (Flash or Silverlight) or ad script that's the cause. Unfortunately, poorly written script has become the blight of the Web, both public- and private-facing.

BitFlipper

In reply to joechung

#Sep 5th @ 6:55 PM

The freezing tab problem happens on every page I visit, even pages that usually open fast. This is not related to a bad script.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

In reply to BitFlipper

#Sep 6th @ 10:06 AM

Did you try it in no add-ons mode?

BitFlipper

In reply to Sven Groot

#Sep 6th @ 10:19 AM

Yep. One of the 1st things I tried. This is not a problem with my configuration - there are many other people seeing this as well, but as usual MS doesn't care to fix this (the IE team seems to be MIA once again) - see this blog post.

MasterPie
I'm white because I smelt an onion

In reply to BitFlipper

#Sep 6th @ 11:11 AM

I had the slow tab opening problem, and then I disabled Java Helper or some Java add in and the tabs went back to opening at normal speed.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to BitFlipper

#Sep 6th @ 11:11 AM

Or maybe it's not a problem, as I don't see it and I don't think I have the Super-Speedy-OMG (tm) Edition.