Quick review of Microsoft's new IE8

My first experience with IE was a pain. I was hoping that after the candidate release that MS would have fixed many of it's errors, but, alas, its being released out to the world via the Windows automatic updates as a critical update!

What's the issue?

The looks and the tabs handling etc. would not be something that would worry me. Those things one gets used to. My issue and bug with IE8 is that it renders many (some fairly normal markup) differently to every other browser out there.

As designers and developers, we already have to contend with browser differences. We have IE6 still being used quite widely - I was visiting a prospective client yesterday and they still use IE6.

IE6 being very different from the IE7 which, in turn, is different from Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Now we have another browser which renders certain things completely differently from all the other browsers.

Well, its more work for all of us!

That, wouldn't be so bad, except for this: how does one charge for something like this? Clients expect you to have all your design ducks in a row. Ouch!