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You may have noticed that day 2 at MIX was IE8 day (compared to the Silverlight 3 day one) in that the puppy launched!

This is good news in that IE 8 is better than IE 7, which is better than IE 6. Maybe, with 6 being two versions back, we have more weight to get rid of the chap. However, even though Microsoft has recently claimed that IE 8 is the fastest browser, its legacy weight still shows for now, and the other browsers are sprinting ahead.

I have a sneaky suspicion that IE 9 is going to be different and a lot better (new team? got the old greats back? or are they on Azure?), but that is wild speculation on my part.

We had a lot of comments on the news today, and one person who will rename anonymous purely because I don’t know if he would like to be attached or not said this:

When you do your IE8 post, don’t forget to toss out a line indicating the writing-mode bug was not fixed. Their only CSS3 feature and they’ve now effectively prevented the entire web for using it for the next x years. Hilariously, they also tried to cover up the bug by marking it fixed and forcing me to open a new one with the same description.

• OLD
• New

I also count two regressions in IE7 compatibility mode that make it different from IE7. Kind of a headache for those counting on sending that header.

So, thanks for the better browser guys, and we can’t wait to see what happens next. Shortly we will have IE 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, Opera 10, and others….. and the Web will have nicer cars to drive around on it. Let’s build applications that take these cars on a decent joy ride instead of boring them in the slow lane.

James Hall saw the good news in Bugzilla that CSS3 multiple backgrounds are now in the Firefox tree, and you can test a Firefox Nightly (Minefield). Firefox joins Safari in the support.

Usage?

Great news for Web developers and users, Safari 4 has a public beta, and it comes with some nice features such as: tabs on top and top sites (a la Chrome), full page zoom, history view, and ARIA Support.

The Twitter thumbnail is interesting

But, what about the engine? Here are some of the features as Apple see’s them:

Speculative Loading

Safari loads the documents, scripts, and style information required to view a web page ahead of time, so they’re ready when you need them.
CSS Effects
Pioneered by Safari, CSS effects help developers add polish to websites by stylizing images and photos with eye-catching gradients, precise masks, and stunning reflections that require only a few lines of code.

CSS Canvas
Using CSS Canvas, web designers can position canvas elements anywhere an image can be placed using CSS. Safari is the first web browser to support CSS Canvas.

Acid 3 Compliance
Safari is the first — and only — web browser to pass Acid 3. Acid 3 tests a browser’s ability to fully render pages using the web standards used to build dynamic, next-generation websites, including CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SVG.

Nitro JavaScript Engine
Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.

HTML 5 Offline Support
Web developers can now create applications that you can use even when you don’t have access to the Internet. Thanks to HTML 5 offline support, designers can build web applications that store themselves on your computer, where you have immediate access to them. Along with the application, web developers can also choose to store the application’s data on your system, so you always have the information you need. Applications and data can be stored in a traditional SQL-like database serving as an application cache or as a “super cookie,” which stores data in the familiar cookie format.

MIX ‘09 has kicked in and “The Gu” just had someone show SuperPreview something that does what we saw with Meer Meer.

SuperPreview let’s you do the same onion peel overlays to see differences across browsers, and you can have everything run in the server (same as Meer Meer). This means that you don’t need to run VMs with various browsers to get your testing in. On Windows and want to see what your app looks like in Safari Mac? No problem.

The demo also showed the nice visualization of seeing where DOM nodes actually are, allowing you to see how the CSS is different. Promising!