IE8 Beta Doesn’t Love GMail & Yahoo Mail

Have anyone installed the Internet Explorer 8 Beta? It has pretty cool stuff and here are some information about this;

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is available for downloading now. And please let us know what you think of Microsoft’s latest web browser.

Microsoft has posted two new web pages related to Internet Explorer 8 beta 1. The first page outlines some of the new features you’ll be able to find in the next generation web browser, while the other page offers download links. Unfortunately the download links don’t seem to be live yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they start working later today as the MIX08 conference gets underway.

In the meantime, here are some of those new features:

• Automatic crash recovery works much like the crash recovery feature in Firefox. If IE8 crashes, the next time you load your browser it will attempt to restore your tabs and other data
• Activities feature which makes it easy to send a link, web page, image, or snippet of text to Digg, Windows Live Maps, Facebook, Dictionary.com or other online services without copying and pasting. Users can install and manage their activities.
• WebSlices allow users to subscribe to just a portion of a web site. Web publishers can add WebSlices to their web page and IE8 can automatically discover WebSlices and add them to your favorites bar. You can view them in a drop-down window like the one you see in the image to the right.

Internet Explorer 8 also has a redesigned favorites bar and improved phishing filtering.

Microsoft recently released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 and, since we’re talking about one of the most popular browsers on the web, lots of people downloaded, installed and tested it. However, some of them may encounter unexpected problems because IE8 doesn’t support several important web services, including Gmail and Yahoo Mail. In fact, you may manage to log in using the “Emulate IE7″ function but, the compatibility issues still exist.

Gmail

Gmail, Google’s mail service available for free for anyone interested in it, supports multiple browsers as the Mountain View-based company mentions in the Help Center. Gmail works with Firefox 2.0 (Windows, Mac and Linux) and Internet Explorer 7 for Windows but you may also use it with other browsers, although it wouldn’t be fully functional, such as IE 5.5+, Safari 1.3+, Netscape 1.4+ and others. Moreover, for IE 4.0+, Netscape 4.07+ and Opera 6.03+, you’ll only get the basic HTML view of Gmail.

Now let’s see what happens when trying to access Gmail with Internet Explorer 8. First of all, the default version of the browser, without the emulation of IE7; as you can see, I managed to log in into my Gmail account but it’s all messed up and it looks like… Moreover, clicking on any link inside it, no matter if we’re talking about settings or an inbox message, takes approximately 5 seconds until it’s opened.

Internet Explorer 8 with IE7 emulation: the service works fine but the left menu which allows you to browse among the Gmail folders looks different and occupies more space on your screen.

Yahoo Mail

The new Yahoo Mail states that it supports IE 6.0 and newer, Firefox 1.0 and newer and Safari 2.0 and newer, on Windows 200, XP, Vista or later and Mac OSX or later. Since it says that IE 6.0 and newer is supported, this would obviously mean that later releases, including IE 8, are also compatible. Well, they’re not. When trying to access Yahoo Mail with Internet Explorer, I got the well-known error: “Hmm… your browser is not officially support. The all-new Yahoo Mail hasn’t been tested on your browser. You can choose to continue, or simply go to Yahoo Mail Classic.”

I finally managed to get inside Yahoo Mail with the emulation active and it worked pretty fine.

So, in case you’re currently considering updating your Internet Explorer browser to version 8, just think twice if you’re addicted to Yahoo Mail and Gmail. Or just wait a while until the two companies include support to the newly released browser.