After I got the browser installed and restarted my computer, I pulled out the browser and looked at my test blog. Uh oh! I know instantly, IE8 is not all that Microsoft told us it would be.

• No CSS3 support (this can be expected)
• Any page with javascript on it gives an ActiveX warning that sounds like your computer just blocked a nuclear missile.
  • Even XML pages with no scripting on them at all give the alert.
• The “write a new post” page in the WP2.5 admin does not load unless you have the rich text editor disabled in your profile.
  • A “popup blocked” alert displays if you click on the dropdown menu on that page.
• Floated elements on a page don’t float correctly. They run on past the clear:both/clear:left/clear:right items and into the content of the next item on a page.
  • IE8′s new “developer” interface tells me that the floated items are inside an item that is three inches away.

Now, let’s look at some screenshots of WordPress 2.5′s new attachment upload interface. Try to spot IE8, Firefox 2, and Safari 3 from these:

Can you tell which one is IE? It should be pretty obvious. IE has no transparency support.

Here’s another test, have you heard that IE8 passes the acid2 test? It’s a lie, even though it’s better than IE7:

If you want a good browser, don’t go to Microsoft. Get , Safari, or Opera.

We’re fans of Twitter around here, in fact many Automatticians have accounts, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.

Automattician Matt Mullenweg wrote this in the WordPress.com blog, two days before Joseph Scott announced big updates to Prologue. I’ve been using prologue for a few days now, along with Nightgunner5, and we’ve liked it quite a lot. We have two prologues, one is in a secret place on a private server, and the other can be found at llamaslayers.wordpress.com.

With Prologue, you answer a simple question and the blog figures the rest out for you, you don’t even need to specify a title, all there is is the content of the post itself. Think of it as a group twitter with no character limit.

It has all the features of a normal blog, simply because it is one. You still have all the core features of WordPress. In fact, all Prologue is is a theme. A template.

Since Prologue is directed towards a different audience than twitter—twitter being for people who want the world to know when they’re eating dinner and Prologue being for programmers (in my experience)—Prologue takes the tags you make on post and calls them projects. It even introduces a new widget, the “Recent Projects” widget, which takes your tags and puts them in order of last posted to.

Prologue, like many other wp.com themes, can be found on the Automattic Subversion Server, and has a header image uploader built right into it.

If you want Prologue, you can download it from the subversion server or get a WordPress.com blog and install the Prologue theme.