Coding & Dreaming Beta

OK, maybe a bit of a haphazard title for a post (but it is very late in the day, and I really should be getting to bed) . Anyway, the anticipated release of Beta 2 was sometime this month (August) and it was finally released yesterday.

It was always a given that Beta 2 was going to be focused on delivering an enhanced and more seemless user experience, rather than concentrating on ‘under the bonnet’ enhancements like Beta 1 tried to deliver. However, on the surface of things, they appear to be very similar; one feature that I immediately noticed had gone (at least from the top toolbar) was the ‘Emulate IE7′ button- to me, this wasn’t much of a suprise as I simply could never see a practical use of that feature for end-users.

I’ve been watching the status on the Connect ticket almost daily as this is probably one of the most popular tickets in the whole system, I imagine (along with this one, this one, and this one.

The call for supporting the Opacity property in IE8 stems from the team removing the proprietary ‘Layout’ concept, which renders the filter property useless (as this document explains), although there had previously been some talk of the longhand value working - this means there is currently no way to emulate opacity in IE8 (the first browser for 10 or so years that doesn’t support a way of emulating this)!!!

The list will gradually be updated - it can be seen at the top of the right column on every page on the site

Found another a couple of days ago which was first highlighted to me in this ticket

Essentially IE8s implementation of the :hover pseudo class is buggy and whether it exhibits the expected behaviour is dependant as to what nesting level the element appears at.

Full bug description and test cases

Recently, I accepted an invitation from the IE devs to take part in their ‘closed’ technical Beta program- essentially filing reports on any bugs I come across (and believe me, there are a huge amount of them already in Connect) in IE8.