And in my opinion, the bigger problem with IE6 was that it was buggy -- both where it purportedly followed standards and where it had its own way of doing things, behavior often didn't match spec or had unexpected side effects. It took devs years of trying to figure out where all the bodies were buried before everybody understood how it worked.
But it is a huge step up from IE6 so if a large chunk of those people suddenly find themselves at IE8 then the world will be better for it.
I wish MS would go back and try to update the IE8 render engine so that it can use some of the newer standards of IE9 or even IE10.
Yes.
Compared to these, the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too.
it's worth looking a few years ahead if IE8 will have another decade of popularity, which isn't impossible. Even without that longevity, the hindrance of the installed base of IE7 and 8 will grow over the next couple of years.
We know what IE10 will have, and roughly when, since it's part of the win8 plans.
I would go with very slow. Faster than IE6, but not by nearly as much as more modern browsers are faster than it. DOM manipulation is very slow compared to more modern browsers (recent versions of Chrome, FF, Opera, ..., even IE9) too. DOM changes being slow is what you'll notice more with most code.
As an aside: make sure you set X-UA-Compatible (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29....) otherwise you'll have no idea if people looking at your stuff in IE8 are using compatability mode or not.
Yup. Here's a chart to put IE6 v IE8 v IE10 javascript engine into perspective: http://goo.gl/3ACqo
Though IIRC the sunspider test is all javascipt processing and no DOM manipulation, so perhaps the fact I pecieve IE8 as not being that much faster may mean that its DOM layer is the bottleneck I'm experiencing. Not unlikely as I don't currently do large amounts of nmuber-crunching and text processing in anything I have to test under IE.
XPsp3 drops off extended support in April 2014 (see http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173 for detail) at which point it will get no new security updates unless you are a company that can afford to pay for them to be done (and if you did need to try that, it would no doubt be very expensive).
It is highly unlikely that the large companies (who are the main bodies holding on to XP and IE6) will allow themselves to still be using XP or IE6 beyond that point.
Unfortunately IE8 will work on Vista and 7, so I can see some corporates upgrading to IE8 and no further for now. The lifecycle lookup chart at MS (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex) doesn't list dates for IE7 or IE8. Assuming that IE8's support window is tied to Windows 7 the same way IE6 and XPsp3 were tied for support purposes (as W7 was delivered with IE8 installed), they'll be able to use IE8 under Windows 7 until 2020 (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=14482) if they are stupid enough to try.