Internet Explorer 8 Beta Features Revealed

Admodieus writes "It seems as though the veil has been lifted on the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices. From the site: 'Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.' Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery, a favorites toolbar, and improved phishing filter protection. Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now."

SVG

[ccguy (1116865)]

I'm sorry to see that there's no SVG support.

As for what _is_ there, well, most of the pages are broken, unavailable ("This project is not yet published"), so if the public documentation is any indication of the development status I'd say IE8 it pretty closed to the usual MS standard :-)

Re:SVG

[pilgrim23 (716938)]

This from a "user" not a developer:
I just this last week tried IE 7 for the very first time. As a user of IE 6, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and having used Every browser from lynx Cello and Mosaic up through the offerings of today, I am not unfamiliar with various browser styles, feel, ways of doing things. From my early experience with it, I can say that 7... to use a standard automobile analogy: The engineer is 5' 2". He designed the seat fixed in one position and not adjustable. The rearview mirror fixed in positon as well; Seat belt? forget it! He likes the parking brake in the back seat so that's how it is going to be.
Microsoft seems to have an irrepressible arrogance when it comes to design. They also seem to have a less then stellar competence in other areas. The former seems to be a fall back for lack ehibited in the later. IE 8 is from the same designers? No thank you

Re:SVG

[T-Bone-T (1048702)]

What is wrong with designing a fixed interface that will be immediately recognized and useful? When Office 2007 came out, people claimed it would kill productivity because things got moved around. If you use IE7 all the time and aren't good with computers, it makes getting a new computer smoother because you don't have to be confronted with an unfamiliar interface.

Re:SVG

[man_of_mr_e (217855)]

I assume you're referring to the lack of customizability of the top part of the UI. This wasn't an arbitrary decision, it was designed this way to reduce the risk of phishing attacks which typically create windows that look like a valid interface. The old customizable interface made it WAY too easy for fishers to grab data from unsuspecting users.

Re:SVG

[ianare (1132971)]

Uh, wouldn't having an unchanging interface make a window easier to forge? You can just grab a screenshot of IE7, having full confidence it will look exactly the same for everyone.
Maybe you are referring to the little dropdown that shows up in pop up dialogs?

From a developer perspective

[an.echte.trilingue (1063180)]

From a designer's perspective, IE7 is a huge improvement over IE6. They fixed really a lot of the css problems, to the point that, if I am careful, I can write a site that is both css/xhtml valid and renders properly in IE7 (even with a css-only drop menu). No hacks or anything. The new version of Trident (IE's rendering engine) isn't perfect, but it's much better.

They also finally implemented png alpha channel, which lets us overlay images such as logos with nice, smooth, aliased edges. To get an idea of the difference this makes, compare these two logos:

• png [languesvivantes.com]
• gif [languesvivantes.com]

Alpha channel support also allows people to do some other nice looking effects, such as drop shadows, with little fuss.

Unfortunately, the people who designed the IE7 UI appear to have been retarded monkeys. The result is that now, almost 2 years after its release, almost a third of my users are still on IE6 [languesvivantes.com]. Personally, that is really frustrating.

I am not optimistic about MS's commitment to continue to improve standards compliance in IE8. It does not support svg, as somebody already pointed out, nor will it support E4X [wikipedia.org], which is going to hobble AJAX development [slashdot.org].

Re:From a developer perspective

[Crazy Taco (1083423)]

The result is that now, almost 2 years after its release, almost a third of my users are still on IE6. Personally, that is really frustrating.

Actually, that's probably not the reason people are still on IE6. I work for a major Fortune 500 company, and we are all still on IE6. This post is brought to you on IE6. Why? Because businesses, especially large ones where all the people are, are really cautious to adopt new technologies. They want to be sure they will work with all the custom software they've written. In our case, some programs depended on very IE6 specific things, or were hacks of some sort, so we are STILL on IE6, and that's all that is supported here. And as a web developer, I have to develop in IE6 so I can see what my users will see. I would love to upgrade, but can't until the company moves us all forward. So that's probably why you have so many IE6 hits; anyone on a laptop issued by a large corporation is probably still using it.

Re:SVG

[jrumney (197329)]

I'm pretty sure the Internet Explorer and Office teams have a competition going on how far they can get away with breaking the Windows UI guidelines and still manage to ship it past QA and management. The Office team used to be well ahead, but with IE 7 the IE team are starting to get closer.

Re:SVG

[Plunky (929104)]

Not everyone wants a customisable interface with thousands of widgets and doohickeys.

No, but millions of people want to turn off the one thing that annoys them, and for each of those people its a different thing..

Re:SVG

[Metaphorically (841874)]

I have to say I'm not surprised but it's still a real bummer. They mention SVG (along with MathML & others) in the section on recognizing namespaces but they don't imply that they'll support it. It does sound like it could be possible to have a helper (Behaviour I think they called it) that could render inline SVG with the appropriate namespace in an XHTML document. I'm too far out of that loop to know for sure if that's a realistic possibility though.

I get the feeling that they're going down the path they have so many times before where there's one level of support for their version of something (in this case Silverlight) and a second-class level of support for "everybody else" (in this case SVG). So that if we do get some third-party to support SVG in IE via an approved MS mechanism, it'll be as an alternative to Silverlight.

Re:

[Metaphorically (841874)]

I think there has to be some other ISV (note the MS name for software vendors other than themselves) to come up with a new SVG binary behaviour to actually enable that kind of rendering. Adobe SVG viewer is pretty much abandoned last I heard. I don't know what motivation anyone would have to develop another plugin for IE that they basically would have no way of making any return off of. Then there's just the fact that people need a plugin that would further hold back any penetration compared to Silverlight.

Re:

[jeff_schiller (877821)]

I also note that this namespace behavior change also allows inline XAML within HTML. How convenient for Microsoft. Renesis is an effort to develop a browser plugin for SVG. It's still not on par with ASV (only Opera and Batik really beat ASV's SVG support). Anyway, as with most plugins, the concept is to give away the plugin and sell the content-generation tools (SVG editor, etc). I'm still waiting to hear more from examotion [examotion.com] on Renesis... sometime in 1Q08 supposedly.

Re:SVG

[smooth wombat (796938)]

A lot of large companies and institutions appear reluctant to finally bury Internet Explorer 6.

It's not always that they don't want to get rid of IE6 but rather, they can't because of their own web pages which have been hacked to work in IE6 or, as in my case, have applications that use a web interface and won't work with IE7 (or anything else).

I wish the folks who I work for would allow more people to install FF but we're a Microsoft-only place and so installing FF, or any other unapproved software, is verboten. Except in the case of where I work which fortunately is somewhat lenient in this regard. So long as we keep it updated, no problems.

The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.

Re:SVG

[Strange Ranger (454494)]

The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.

Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.

This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs [wikipedia.org] or PHBs [wikipedia.org].

Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage [aleph.se] trying to protect their positions of power.

Re:SVG

[masdog (794316)]

I think you answered your own question before you even asked it. There is software out there that was designed to work with IE5.5 and IE6 that hasn't been updated to work with IE7 yet. I can see in-house projects as being one of those areas, but there are also large commercial systems that have been customized to meet the customer's needs that may not be able to apply IE7 compatibility patches without some sort of patch customization.

Just because Microsoft pushes an update doesn't mean that the update has been tested with end-user systems. That is IT's job, and if IT finds that the update breaks critical systems that the business depends on, they won't push the update out until it is fixed.

Re:SVG

[bdeclerc (129522)]

On a site I manage, Mira Public Observatory [www.mira.be] (Belgian Dutch site), I've used IE6-only conditional commenting of some javascript and a class attribute to replace the transparant PNG's with less attractive GIF's on IE6 browsers. On all other browsers, the script isn't run, so the images aren't replaced.

This doesn't actually slow down the site in any really noticeable manner for IE6-users, and not at all for anyone else (admittedly, I simply ignore IE5.5 and older, but by now that's less than 0.2% of my visiting audience). I've found this a good compromise, the IE6 users get a slightly slower and less pretty site, but the difference isn't huge and I expect them to die out in a few years anyway...

Broken links in the summary

[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

You can download the latest browser from here: www.microsoft.com/IE8/download [mozilla.com]

Re:

[kellyb9 (954229)]

but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)?

Yes

Hmmm ...

[Der Einzige (1042022)]

Those features sound suspiciously like Mac OS X's Services menu and Web Clip widget. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

Crash recovery, eh?

[religious freak (1005821)]

Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery

Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Or at least spin it a little better.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[J0nne (924579)]

Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery

Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Or at least spin it a little better.

Firefox has the same feature too. Browsers have to accept tons of different types of input (html, js, css, different image formats, ...) and try to make sense of it all. Third-party extensions and plugins can cause the browser to crash.

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but that was low, even for Slashdot.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash.

Unlike Firefox, I haven't had IE crash at all in the past 4 years.

Oh yeah, that's because I haven't used IE in the past 4 years. :-)

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Z34107 (925136)]

I'm never greeted with a new toolbar.

How do people do this to their computers? You're reading/posting to slashdot, so I assume you're technically competent.

Even when I was using Internet Explorer 6, I never had this problem. I've had one virus the entire time I've used Windows (since 3.11) - and that was some file infecting virus I got on Windows 98 from who-knows-where. (Although I suspect my younger brother-knows-where, but I digress.)

Never had toolbars, and pop-ups stopped when I got IE7 (beta 1.) But, somehow, people manage to trash their Windows boxes, and trash them regularly.

How did you manage this? What sites did/do you browse? What horrible Bonzi-buddy software do you use on your computer? I'd like to know what the rest of my extended family (the ones who think I'm free 24-hour technical support) is doing.

It ain't hard

[erikharrison (633719)]

They use the computer. For god's sake, you didn't have to go to a website to get the Sasser virus, infected machines would attack random IPs. If you bought an XP machine when Sasser was rampant, I knew many people who were infected on first boot, before they could even install a firewall or virus scanner.

You've never been emailed a Word document (with a VBA virus)? You've never installed AOL (which overwrites your netstack)? Never been redirected to a warez site (via a compromised legit website)? Hell, for years Wal-Mart used to sell software packages full of dubious "shareware", TurboTax was at one point under legal fire for installing a backdoor, you can't put a Sony audio CD in your machine for fear of installing DRM crippleware behind your back, and OEM machines are loaded with potentially insecure adware begging you to upgrade to the full version.

While it's not entirely inconceivable that you have always run Windows machines behind a hardware firewall, run expensive third party antivirus packages, never run other third party software (thus discarding the best reason to use Windows), and use your machine only for browsing websites you are 100% sure are uncompromised, it is absolutely beyond belief to me that you can be running Windows since 3.x days and not be aware of how easy it is for a machine to get loaded with garbage. As I pointed out, it's not even safe to plug in a vanilla XP machine into the internet without risk of being immediately infected.

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[davidsyes (765062)]

What i like about Firefox's crash recovery is that it not only works during a crash, but when i task-kill it to recover RAM when AutoCAD drawings are huge or print spooling is dragging.

When it recovers my tabs (20+ in one instance for personal sites and 20+ tabs in another FF instance for work-related sites) and two instances of FF, it makes me feel good.

Someone questioned IE8 beta's design origins. That XP and 2K STILL (seemingly) have no patch to enable the sysadmin to come along and lock the current user and do some admin tasks without killing the apps/processes in play, and no apparent ability to restore the complete prior crashed or saved session, it makes me feel very good that i use KDE.

It appears to me that even in vista there is no memory of previous sessions to open up or restore all apps from the previous session. Why is this. Are they afraid it will give ammunition to Open Source to counter ms' dubious patent infringement threats?

Back to browsers: i LIKE Flock, but found it crashes when some myspace profiles start up the music applet. Even clicking on STOP loading in the browser menu and on the music applet is not enough to stop the crash. Killing the tab on restore previous session does work, as a workaround. i LIKE FF, and wish it would use the KDE file exploring/management widgets to which I've become so attached. i can't stand that older file display interface. i LIKE KDE. Nautilus it interesting, but i'm mostly in KDE or minimal interfaces.

(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"...

Join me: i will try to lead the way...

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[Shippy (123643)]

i LIKE Flock...

i LIKE FF...

i can't stand...

(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"...

Um, ok, good for you. You're still supposed to capitalize the beginning of a sentence, though.

Also, it's not due to arrogance. It does have some history behind it. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%28pronoun%29 [wikipedia.org]:

In orthography, this pronoun is comparable to proper nouns. In most writing I is always capitalised. This convention dates to the late Middle Ages, when the form i first developed from the earlier ic. Writers of handwritten manuscripts began to use a capital I because the lower-case letter was hard to read and sometimes mistaken for part of the previous or succeeding word. This practice continued after the introduction of printing partly because it was already established and partly because it improved readability.

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[AeroIllini (726211)]

Join me: i will try to lead the way...

Ok, and when we're done fixing English to be less arrogant, we can hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and complain about how rich people are evil.

The Germans capitalize *all* their nouns, the arrogant bastards! What makes a noun so much more important than a verb? Nouns don't even *do* anything!

WOW!

[quaketripp (621850)]

First they introduced tabbed browsing, now they've upgraded the context menus and integrated feeds! I just don't know how anyone can keep up with them. OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall! viva la revolution!

Re:WOW!

[MrNemesis (587188)]

Hey, we can at least be thankful that they didn't move the "back" button to the bottom right hand corner, remove the option to configure connection settings from within the app itself, reverse the direction of scrolling (i.e. scroll right and left to go up and down and vice versa), raster bitmaps and GIF files in CMYK as opposed to RGB and turn sentences begining with prepositions into French swearing. All these new UI paradigms we're missing out on!

In a rare moment of originality, a young MS exec, having just read the hitch hikers guide, sent a binary of IE7 back in time in an attempt to sue the companies developing firefox, opera and a million and one other more inventive browsers in the future for copying IE's features. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the new IE interface as a crude hoax perpetrated by 4chan, and the budding young exec was made Ballmer's personal chair man.

Not that I think the IE7 interface is an abomination of consistency and style or anything ;)

the classic joke...

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Microsoft: "Hey, wait for us - We're the leader!"

I'm glad they're going to be supporting all these 'new' standards. :)

Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

...tell Microsoft that we don't give a flying hoot about Activities and Internet Julian Fries. As developers, we want to know if they'll support CSS2 (and God-forbid even some CSS3 *gasp!*), DOM2, SVG, ECMAScript 3rd Edition, and half-a-billion other standards that they've been ignoring. If they want to make developers really happy while future-proofing their browser, they'll support HTML5 and ECMAScript 2.0.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

Re:Will someone please...

[GregChant (305127)]

If you read the article, you'd have noticed the linking page, Everything a developer needs to know [microsoft.com], which explains IE8's CSS2.1 compliance (with provisional CSS3 compliance), among other developer-related information. It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know.

Re:Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, Microsoft is NOT promising any of the features I'm referring to. I read the white paper on Circular References. Are they building a better, more standards-compliant Javascript engine? No, they're only fixing circular references, a problem that never should have existed in the first place. I read the white paper on "DOM Core Improvements". Are they adding DOM2 features? No, they're just fixing a few minor differences between the W3C spec and their implementation of DOM.

About the only spec that Microsoft MIGHT actually be taking seriously is CSS2.1. And even then, I'm not holding my breath that they do a good job of it.

Re:Will someone please...

[crush (19364)]

And not just the above, but the "WebSlices" crap is just another way to muddy the Atom/RSS [wikipedia.org] waters. We do NOT need another feed "standard" thanks.

Re:Will someone please...

[tobiasly (524456)]

It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know.

Hardly. Reading the developer link reveals the following gem on an example for implementing WebSlices:

<div class="hslice" id="1">
<p class="entry-title">item - $66.00</p>
<div class="entry-content">high bidder:buyer1
...
</div>
</div>

Wow... I hope there are no existing web pages that happen to use the CSS class name "hslice" for anything, otherwise they're in for an unpleasant surprise when IE8 begins interpreting them in their own special way!

So now the whole "IE8 will break existing sites" discussion comes into clearer focus. Microsoft's definition of standards-compliant (which should surprise no one I guess) is that their proprietary "extensions" now happen to be (X)HTML compliant.

It'll all end in tears....

[caluml (551744)]

Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ...

Oh god. This sounds just like the "Hey, let's let the email client run scripts", and "Let's hide the nasty, confusing file extensions from the users" decisions.
Some things should just be a little tricky to do. Like saving a file from an email, locating it, (chmod u+x in *nix), and only then executing it.

un, effing, real.

[sootman (158191)]

This is hysterical. 'WebSlices' are similar to Safari's Web Clip [apple.com] feature. Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox. (And Saft gives it to Safari.) And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new? In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So... it's called a "favorites" bar now so users will think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!" rather than the old "links" name which led users to think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!"? Ooh, and it can hold links to documents as well? Er, yeah, that makes a lot of sense... I've always felt that the biggest thing missing from a web browser was access to random local documents. Because there aren't enough other ways to access often-needed files.

Re:un, effing, real.

[rucs_hack (784150)]

All they're really doing is saying that IE8 is now pretty much equivilent to the other browsers.
Of course these features already exists in other browsers, they know this, or they wouldn't have bothered. They left IE6 alone for ages until Firefox got a foothold. They're hardly going to put that in a way that makes it sound like its just a catch up exercise though, are they, it has to sound exciting and new. After all, to them, and most IE only users, it *is* new.

Actually, any improvement over IE's favorites system would be a good thing, I have to use it from time to time, and it's quite badly implemented.

Safety Filter

[losethisurl (980326)]

We can filter if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't filter and if they don't filter
Well they're no friends of mine

AJAX Navigation Support

[jeremyds (456206)]

One of the more interesting features included with IE8 is "Ajax Navigation":

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.

This is actually a proposed standard in the HTML 5 specification and it's nice to see Microsoft implementing it. The inability to bookmark or navigate to a page that's been updated using AJAX has always been a pain in the ass.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali (942731)]

I've built sites in the past fortnight which use document.location.hash to allow navigation to/from different AJAXified or otherwise dynamic sections of a page (either by typing the URL with the anchor directly, or by using back/forward), and it works wonderfully in every browser I've tried including IE 6.

About the only "clever" bit here is firing an event automatically when it changes, which just removes the three lines of code I have checking whether window.location.hash is myfoo.savedHash or not in an interval ticker. ...and they turned this into a whole complete feature, and got somebody to think up a name for it?!

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali (942731)]

You miss the point--people will have to write code specifically for this feature (which, incidentally, won't work in other browsers for a while yet), when if they were going to do that they could just have written it to work in the first place.

What makes you think people who can't manage to beat out a couple of lines of pretty simple code are going to be able to write code for "AJAX Navigation support" and do it in a way which degrades gracefully?

The whole thing is something that will make life easier for web developers in the long term, but have little effect in the short term. What it won't do is magically make life any easier for end users.

ACR

[RiotingPacifist (1228016)]

The "Crash Recovery" actually seams to be quite good, better than Firefox anyway, if its implemented well, it means each tab runs in a separate thread (although for some reason they called them processes) and can crash/recover separately, as well as implementing the standard session restore.

Re:ACR

[Skuto (171945)]

>it means each tab runs in a separate thread (although for some reason they called them processes)

Processes and threads are vastly different things.

For example, one thread crashing means all other threads in the same process go down with it.

This is probably exactly why they use processes instead of threads.

Whats with all the change?

[flowpoke (1251410)]

It seems that with each major version, they (and most other folks) try to reinvent everything and cloud it with branding. NO ONE enjoys radical change with little to no benefit. The interface needs to be more transparent, not cluttered with new terminology and features that matter NONE when compared to things like speed, stability and security.

I don't think MS will ever get it...

Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*?

[Bodero (136806)]

I just installed the IE8 beta. Overall, it's slow, but I'd expect that from a beta. My main concern is that, at least on my machine, the popup blocker was disabled by default. Is this the new standard?

Welcome back, Popups.

IE8 Features

[Stan Vassilev (939229)]

I'm reading through the comments here and I can't believe my eyes. Boy, are you bitter, or what...

The features IE8 implements are a direct answer to what most users on Slashdot I've seen whine for years on an on, and still there's barely few mildly positive responses here, it's just so sad (for Slashdot).

Let me list a fraction of the improvements of IE8, should it be too hard for you to RTFA-s:

- Much improved compliance with the CSS 2.1 standards, compliance with certain most requested CSS3 features. This includes, but not limited to features such as display:inline-table, :after, :before, content attribute, counter-reset / counter-increment, box-sizing (implemented as -ms-box-sizing, similar to -moz-box-sizing as it's not finalized in CSS3), fixes on the p/div handling, CSS outline, improvements to text orientation rendering,

- Data URI support would dramatically simplify dynamic content generation in some instances, and improve the performance on pages with many small images (you can embed those images in the HTML and save yourself some 10-20 additional HTTP requests).

- More complete support for the CSS attributes related to page printing, such as @page, left/right/first page selectors, page-break-inside, widows, orphans properties.

- Kick-ass development and debugging tools that rival FireBug for Firefox (honestly, check the white-paper). If you're a web developer, you're probably using FireBug intensively, now you can debug with the same ease on IE.

- Hooks for AJAX navigation (I had to implement JS navigation on a project as recently as a week ago, and I know this will save me quite some time in the future, if the other browsers follow suit), DOM Storage (super-cookies :) ) that allow much richer offline storage, and combine this with ability to detect if the network is down/offline or not, and let your JS handle the situation! XHR has timeout now as well.

- CSS selectors API exposed to JS. Do you have any idea how *important* that is? Look at any popular JS library today: Prototype, jQuery, MooTools. They all *emulate* this feature. Some browsers, are starting to implement this, and now that IE is among them, those JS libraries can act as a simple proxy to the native Selectors API, and thus deliver substantial performance boost to pages doing lots of selections.

- 6 connections per host, versus 2. Before you start complaining how this will overload some servers: IE will start with 2 connections, and if it detects the connection is speedy, it'll build up to 6 dynamically. This means if you're being Slashdotted, for example, IE will detect this and keep connections 2 at a time.

- OBJECT tag was boosted to support all MIME types, using standard markup, the way other browsers handle it. That includes images.

- ActiveX plugins can now easily hook to an element namespace and provide rendering services, for example MathML, SVG etc.

- Cross-domain messaging and requests! This will make certain (safe!) application a *lot* easier. Currently the only workaround to safe cross-domain communication is a hack involving multiple iframes and hash manipulation. No more, this a really forward-looking of Microsoft to implement, hopefully the other browsers follow-suit.

- Sane versioning model, so if your site breaks in IE8 you can request IE7 mode via simple meta tag. The default would be the most compliant mode (as covered on a previous article).

- I've heard lots of whining here on Slashdot in the past about the circular memory 'leak' IE JS had. Now this is fixed. It's not as trivial as you might thing it is, and IE JS doesn't suffer alone from this problem (popular languages like PHP for example exhibit the same issue). A new garbage collector was implemented to fix this.

- Performance improvements to the CSS/HTML/JS subsystem will deliver speedier browsing without expected compatibility issues.

IE8 supports the latest features

[R3d Jack (1107235)]

In keeping with this theme, I suggest that the IE8 name be dropped in favor of something to reflect just how up-to-date this new browser is. How about IE 2005?

IE8 Fails slashdot test

[EmperorKagato (689705)]

Out of the box IE8 seems to have trouble with the CSS based login on the frontpage of slashdot.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

A tribute to Top Gear

[gnarlin (696263)]

A new Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Will it smoke the Firefox? Will it outsing the Opera? Well, let's find out!

First, it only runs on ONE platform. Microsoft windows. Making a multi-platform program today is easy. Even a toddler can do it. All the cool programmers and companies are doing it. There are so many toolkits that can do it that you are really spoiled for choice. Even if they really want to use the windows API they could still check to make sure it runs with wine. Google can do it, so could Microsoft. There really is no excuse in 2008 not to, except perhaps if you are trying to hold on to a sagging monopoly.

Second. You can't modify it, redistribute it or use it to run a nuclear powerplant. Simply put: It isn't Free software. Looking under the bonnet is a must for any youngster that wants to know what makes the engine go and to tweak it. Sadly, Microsoft aren't up to that challenge.

Finally, I don't like the icon or the color. It's a letter, you know, from the alphabet. Here try clicking this: e [google.com]

Ugly, isn't it.

So what happened when I tried to run it? Well, since I don't run an operating system from that particular company I instead tried to run it, with some WINE (http://www.winehq.com). This is a piece of software that Google use with great success to run its windows native Picasa application on GNU+Linux and BSD operating systems.
Right from the getgo: The wheels spin, but the installer crashes and burns as it fails to install the program right at the beginning. What a letdown.
My conclusion then: It's simply rubbish. You can have Mozilla Firefox for half the price and all the benefits of the Freedom it brings. Also, Firefox has a new beta out that smokes IE8 right from the starting line. In fact it can be installed and run right now on almost any platform you can think of! Microsoft are still stuck in the 1990s thinking that you only make cars for one type of road and that people aren't interested in modifying them. Until they change their ways they will always be second class.

Final lap score:
0 out of 10.