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."

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[J0nne]

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:Will someone please...

[GregChant]

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.

ACR

[RiotingPacifist]

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.

Activities - more IE only "standards"?

[nixeagle]

Looking at the developer guide [microsoft.com], I noticed that the activities require the website designer to program this IE only feature into their sites. As it is XML, I suppose it would be fairly easy for others to catch up, but this does sound like something developers will have to do just for IE... unless I'm looking at this one wrong. Anyone care to clarify?

Re:ACR

[Skuto]

>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.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali]

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:SVG

[jeff_schiller]

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:Crash recovery, eh?

[Z34107]

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.

Re:WOW!

[mtmra70]

OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall!

Actually, this is something to look out for. For example, your company firewall may block google.com on port 80, but if you company does not block SSH connections, you can easily bypass it.

Simply setup PuTTY to create a localhost tunnel and establish a SSH connection to an outside source. All of a sudden you can browse the web through the encrypted tunnel. If you need a little more help for apps that open various ports or need to resolve the DNS externally, throw in SSHProxy and you can force all ports/DNS queries to run through the SSH tunnel.

IE8 Features

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

From a developer perspective

[an.echte.trilingue]

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].

ies4lin?

[unityofsaints]

Damn it won't install in wine :D I wonder when the first ies4lin version will come out?

Wow...

[CrazyTalk]

Looks just like Safari on my circa 2004 iBook (especially the toolbar).

Re:SVG

[bdeclerc]

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...

IE8 Fails slashdot test

[EmperorKagato]

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?

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[account_deleted]

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