Today was a browser day.

Installed the IE8 beta. Not much to say on this. It looks very like IE7. has improved standards compliance compared with other versions of IE. I had read that there were problems due to the way if renders pages compared with IE6 and 7 (i.e. closer to the standard). However I was surprised how true this is, for example the University I work at does not do any browser specific stuff, you get the same html/css regardless, yet IE8 seems to have problems rendering certain elements. The logo often appeared in the wrong place (but would jump to the right place when you moved the mouse over it), sometimes a navigation bar at the top would appear twice, or with a gap between it and the top of the browser. Yet Firefix, Opera and Safari (all fairly good at complying with standards) all show these pages without problems, so why would IE8 be any different. I only visited a few more sites, but again odd little problems were showing up. Also of note, the beta has a developer meny pre-installed, looks useful for browsing html/css etc.

Flock: heard a little about this, and noticed it showing up a fair bit in my web logs. Does what it says on the tin, a web browser with web 2.0 social networking built in. Seems nicely done, I easily got going with my gmail, twitter, flickr and facebook accounts. My initial reaction to the feedreader element though wasn’t so great. Because it is designed to be used instead of (as opposed to along side with) your existing rss feed reader (for me, bloglines). You basically have to go for one or the other, i.e. if you used both one would not know what posts you have read in the other and so show them as unread (though importing was easy enough). As I like to be able to read by feeds from any computer, I’ll continue to use bloglines for the time being. If there was some way flock could sync your read posts with bloglines (or google reader) then that would be excellent. I haven’t had much chance to play with it yet, so I’m sure many features still to discover.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 betas for a while. This seems like an excellent release: using less memory and improved bookmarks etc.

This leaves me with Opera. My favourite browser. I switched a year or so a go when it seemed much snappier than Firefox, and many of the addons I installed for Firefox were simply not needed in Opera as they could be done out of the box (except the wonderful web developer toolbar). Last October I downloaded the Opera 9.5 beta. This was wonderful, and built on the excellent browser, and allows syncing of bookmarks (something Firefox is trying to do with a major project). Yet it is now almost 6 months down the line and no progress has been made. They still release weekly snapshot builds (though this are not beta releases) but no updates or additionally betas.

I’m hoping we might see some progress soon with Opera 9.5 soon.