Here at Sizzle, we love new web technologies, and we're particularly fond of the increasing trend towards code standardisation and the adoption of lean xHTML and CSS. Unfortunately, the ability for the Internet to develop at full pace is limited by the reluctance of the general public to adopt newer, better browsers. Much as we'd love to abandon older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (which would allow for the development of slicker, quicker, more usable, more search engine-friendly websites), a whopping 17% of users have not upgraded despite it becoming outdated way back in 2006.

This latest version of Firefox brings with it support for two very exciting (from a nerd's point of view) HTML tags: <video> and <audio> allowing rich multimedia content to be embedded on-site without reliance on bulky plugins. It also has support for the new W3C Geolocation API, CSS 2.1 and CSS3 properties, and support for offline applications. Admittedly, most of this stuff won't affect the end-user just yet, since us web developer types can't abandon the people using old browsers, but it's great to see the Mozilla foundation pushing ahead with these new standards.

From a user's point of view, the new release comes with new and improved rendering and Javascript engines, meaning websites will load in less time and operate faster and more reliably. It also includes a new 'private browsing' toggle, ideal for use on publically-accessible machines or situations when you'd prefer people not to know what sites you've been on, for whatever reason.

Anyway, enough blabbering. If you're feeling adventurous, the release is available for download right here!

We loathe Internet Explorer here at Sizzle. Not only is it insecure (i.e. you're more likely to get spyware or viruses), slow, and non-customisable, but the browser also has a history of being non-compliant with web standards. This means when we build a website using nice, neat, and well-structured code, Internet Explorer often fails to render it correctly, despite us doing nothing wrong. This means we have to resort to complicated hacks and time-consuming workarounds to get sites displaying properly.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, this wasn't too much of a problem. Websites were simple, uncomplicated affairs, and so displaying a site in a cross-compatible way was fairly easy. However, it's now 2009, and websites are often dynamic, graphical behemoths compared to their svelte, simple ancestors. Creating lean, adaptable code is the name of the game, and Internet Explorer's stubborn refusal to display such code correctly often significantly extends development time. And with almost 50% of web surfers using IE as a result of it being installed by default on every Windows PC, they're too big a crowd to ignore, much as we'd love to.

That's why we welcome today's 'Release Candidate' download of Internet Explorer 8. For the first time, Microsoft seem to have realised that progression is important, and that proper rendering of websites is essential to the development of the web as a globally-useful commodity, and so they've focused on standards compliance and proper rendering. While IE8 is still nowhere near as flexible as alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera, or Chrome, it's an awful lot better than their previous editions.

We urge all of our clients, and every reader of this blog, to either update or switch browsers altogether. The more we can abandon the use of such antiquated browsers as IE7, 6 or the abysmal-but-somehow-still-in-use 5.5, the sooner the web can begin to evolve as it properly ought to!