Internet Explorer 8 and the Boring Era of Web Browsers

Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 today, and we've been playing with it at PC World. Here's my colleague Melissa Perenson's first take, and here's a link to Microsoft's download page. If you're intrigued, proceed with caution: Microsoft says that the beta is mostly for developers at this point, and both Melissa and I encountered multiple crashes and quirks.

In this early version, IE 8 is not an upgrade that's going to bowl you over with amazing new functionality. Microsoft is touting its better compliance with Web standards. (Shouldn't the world's dominant browser already be super-compatible with the Web?) It says that IE now recovers from crashes more gracefully. (Wouldn't it be nicer if it didn't crash?) A feature called Activities lets developers add functionality to IE in a way that doesn't seem radically different from things clever sites have done for years with plain ol' bookmark buttons; Web Slices, which let sites create widgety little snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button, are kind of interesting--but they'll only take off if they're widely supported by major sites, and they're not radically different from Apple's Web Clip feature in Safari, which works with all Web pages, not just ones designed to support it.

IE 8, in other words, may turn out to be an improvement on IE 7...but it would appear to be a minor upgrade. (I respect adherence to Web standards and stand to benefit from them...but that doesn't mean I can summon any visceral excitement for them.) It's not Microsoft-bashing to call it dull: Firefox 3, also in developer-preview mode, has a much longer list of improvements, but most are fit-and-finish niceties or fixes for things that were kind of broken in Firefox 2, like its memory management.

By any measure, we're in the middle of one of the most exciting eras the Web has ever seen. Everyone from behemoths like Google to tiny companies such as 37 Signals is developing Web-based services that are powerful and fun to use. Google Gears is taking Web apps offline; Adobe AIR is taking them out of the browser and onto the desktop. The rush of creativity is downright inspiring.

And yet the people who design browsers, the applications we use to get to most of the Web, seem to be short on fresh ideas. (One exception: social browser Flock, which I spend most of my time online in these days.) Part of the problem is clearly the maturity of the products in question: IE 8's very version number reveals its advanced age, and given its origins, Firefox 3 is essentially...um, well Netscape 8 or so. Both browsers have most of the features they need, and have for years.

But it still seems to me that there's plenty of room for browsers to evolve. I use multiple PCs and want a browser that silently and reliably syncs every bookmark and every setting between multiple iterations of itself on every PC. I want a better way to keep track of hundreds of sites than bookmarks, which have barely changed since 1994. I want a fast and easy way to save pages to my hard drive. I want printing options that are better than anything in any current browser. I want smarter password managers and form-fillers.

Most of all, I want to be surprised--the way I was when I used my first browser (Mosaic, back in late 1994). Or when I first encountered tabbed browsing (in Maxthon, I believe, back when it was called MyIE2). Or when I saw what a gigantic improvement Firefox was on earlier Mozilla browsers. Or, most recently, when I discovered that Flock is in several ways a better Firefox than Firefox.

Come to think of it, I felt the same sense of happy surprise when I first used Microsoft Office 2007, which was an upgrade to a product even older than any Web brower--and a wonderfully inventive one. So so I think it's theoretically possible, at least, that Microsoft may give us a genuinely exciting new Internet Explorer someday--but IE 8 won't be it, unless the company springs new features on us before it ships the final version...