And the last thing, most used browser = most attacked browser, so it’ll sooner or later be a easy to catch prey…

4. Web standards
The first obvious-blatant thing you missed to say is that W3C web standards is not just HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 but also ECMAScript 10262 3rd edition, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, DOM 1 Core, DOM 2 Core, DOM 2 Events, DOM 2 HTML interfaces. In all these specifications (final technical releases), IE 8 is weak and/or incomplete and/or with a buggy implementation. Test suites have been done on each/all of these web standards specification and can be verified, tested by anyone.

Back in 2006 (1), I warned Microsoft that web standards is not just CSS 2.1 but also other W3C Technical recommendations.

I personally filed and/or reported 226 bug reports regarding IE 8. I know several who filed and/or reported dozens of bug reports at connect IE beta feedback on in their websites. I *know* IE 8’s CSS 2.1 implementation would not be as good (correctnessly speaking) if it had not been of dozens and dozens of people reporting bugs. Some of them have been reporting bugs about IE during years, even over a decade you know. And I know that there are still (at least 50, possibly more than 100) CSS 2.1 bugs remaining to fix and CSS 2.1 features waiting to be implemented.

3. Ease of use
Toolbars and buttons are more configurable and customizable in other browsers.
No need for compatibility switch button in other browsers.

5. Developer tools
Firefox DOM inspector is easier to use, I’d say, and quite powerful. Safari developer tools are quite powerful. And so is Opera’s Dragonfly.

7. Customizability
The add-ons extensions I use in Firefox, mostly developer tools, I can not find any of them, not one, for IE 8. Now, since IE8 rely on a broken-document-switch-to-compatibility, you would logically expect them to provide more and helpful/assisting add-on extensions to support upgrading webpages… but they have not.
No Site Navigation toolbar add-on for IE 8. Firefox 2+, Seamonkey 1+, Opera 7+, Konqueror 3.x, Konqueror 4.x and lots of other browsers have this; one notable exception is Safari.
No HTML validation add-on extension (working offline) for IE 8. Firefox and Seamonkey have this.
No HTML Tidy add-on extension embeddable into IE 8.

10. Performance
Many people, including me, complained about creating a new tab being slow, considerably slower than for other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari). A bug report was even created twice regarding this.

One weak area of IE 8 is accessibility. Other browsers (except Safari, I’d say) are more advanced than IE 8 and this can be measured, established by tests and careful reading of UAAG 1.0.

No minimum font-size settable in IE 8: aging baby-boomers and people with low vision will prefer Firefox and Opera here.
Many HTML object elements will not work or render alternate content. (eg: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~sairwas/object-test/java/ and I’m using the latest JRE 1.6.0_u14)
No possibility for the IE 8 user to override attributes like noresize (for frames), scrolling=no, frameborder=0.
No way for the IE 8 user to restore window resizability (and scrollability and other window toolbars) of secondary windows. Etc, etc.
And I can show you the channel9 wiki page where several people requested those back in 2005.

regards, Gérard
–
(1): “but W3C web standards is much more than just CSS. W3C web standards includes also HTML 4.01 specification, DOM 2 interfaces specification, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 1.0 specification and other key specifications: when comparing with other browsers (Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.04), the latest MSIE 7 is behind – way behind – other browsers in all these specifications.”
http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs/CWilsonMSIE7AndCSSCompliance.html
6 september 2006

Also, thank you for pointing out the fact about Safari. I did not realize that Safari offered private browsing before Chrome. I stand corrected. Still, though, IE8 certainly was not the first.

Regarding number 5, thank you for pointing that out. That’s a very valid point.

As far as your response to number 7, I’m not sure what part of my post inferred that I was even referring to themes.

Your response to number 9 makes perfect sense. Of course, if that was truly as real of a concern as you make it out to be, they’d be using Linux instead of Windows.

Regarding performance, you’re absolutely right. I can’t put a final word on it, nor can Microsoft. Still, in my personal experience, Chrome is the fastest of the three, then IE8 and then Firefox lags way behind (in start-up time and page load time).

@Wallace – I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. Unfortunately, that type of advertising does work on great numbers of people. That’s just the way the world works. When people see charts and graphs, they automatically assume that the data is factual.

2. Safari was the first browser to offer the private browsing mode, not Chrome. Chrome just made it very easier to use.

5. If IETester is an independent product, so are the add ons for Firefox used for debugging. Although, IE 8’s dev tools aren’t bad either.

7. Theming isn’t the first feature people look for in a browser. At least the average person. Customization means, you can add toolbars, plugins and add ons which do a good enough job. Although the extensions for FF give more choices, they can really slow down and bloat it.

9. Manageability is important for IT staff in offices and corporations. Using it they can put different types of restrictions easily on the browser. IE also works very well with the group policy client in Windows making life easy for IT staff.

10. You can’t put a final word on the performance between these browsers IMO. Some websites load faster in IE, some in FF, and most in Chrome.