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]

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 :-)

Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman]

...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.

It'll all end in tears....

[caluml]

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.

Re:un, effing, real.

[rucs_hack]

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.

Re:SVG

[pilgrim23]

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:WOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's similar to one of the features of Yahoo Pipes.

Interesting. And if Microsoft were to, say, buy Yahoo, then Yahoo wouldn't be able to sue them for patent infringement.

Re:SVG

[Metaphorically]

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.

/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[Cyclops]

The number of excessively-Microsoft-friendly (beyond what could be considered reasonable, for instance this article which talks about nothing that matters for nerds and only mentions some ridiculous luser features instead of non-standards compliance, or the other one where a fake Open Source operating system from Microsoft was published, etc...) articles has increased hugely.

AJAX Navigation Support

[jeremyds]

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:It'll all end in tears....

[Knuckles]

Also, "users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another"? Really? So much more than from one Word file to another that we need to invent this feature for an internet-facing app of all things?

Re:Hmmm ...

[jrothwell97]

Yep.

IE7 was a crap attempt to copy Firefox. Methinks this will be a crap attempt to copy Safari.

Re:Broken links in the summary

[jrothwell97]

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

You must be new here.

Re:SVG

[Metaphorically]

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.

So the situation as I see it is still pretty grim. There's a tiny window open but it's not enough to get anything through as far as I see it.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[mingot]

Strange. I never had toolbar that I didn't install just 'show up'. My 11 year old daughter does constantly, though. It's usually down to her having installed the latest MEGA INSTANT MESSANGER PONYS AND UNICORNS EMOTICON PACK or something similar and *gasp* not reading the part where it explains that it's going to install 14 toolbars and a bunch of other spyware. This is why she works in a VM. Maybe ask one of your parents to set one up for you?

Whats with all the change?

[flowpoke]

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...

Re:Will someone please...

[crush]

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:SVG

[masdog]

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

[T-Bone-T]

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:Will someone please...

[Dan Schulz]

Did anyone notice that the value of the ID attribute in that example is invalid? (ID attribute values cannot start with a numeral.)

Overall though, I'm starting to like what I'm seeing with IE 8, especially now that my main complaint against the browser (having to opt-in for real standards support) has been consigned to the deepest darkest pits of Hell (and I don't mean the town in Michigan either).

Of course, I do reserve the right to reserve judgment until I can finally get around to playing with the browser to see what works, what doesn't, and how it handles the way I develop Web sites.

Re:SVG

[ianare]

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?

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali]

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.

Re:SVG

[Strange Ranger]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It ain't hard

[erikharrison]

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:SVG

[Plunky]

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:From a developer perspective

[Crazy Taco]

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:IE8 Features

[Riskable]

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,

"Improved compliance" still isn't compliance. Why we're cynical: We've all been waiting for Microsoft to "catch up" to every other browser and it seems that their future holds nothing but further catch-up. I guess we'll all have to wait until IE 9 or Linux/Mac desktop dominance?

- 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.

More catch-up: Data URI is already supported in everything else [wikipedia.org] and the page printing CSS attributes are just more standards compliance catch-up.

- 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.

So Microsoft is trying to court developers back to their platform by providing more proprietary development tools? I'm going to give you an imaginary quote from Microsoft-of-the-future: "Microsoft cannot guarantee that pages developed with their tools will work in other browsers"... Just like the old days! Build a site in Frontpage and who cares what it looks like in anything but IE? Here's some advice for developers: Microsoft's tools are only ever good for developing/debugging sites for Microsoft browsers.

- 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.

It is sad, really... More proprietary "features". Just what we DON'T need. Let me explain it to you: If you've added a feature to your browser that requires developers write code to take advantage of it you are undermining standards. I see no reason to trust Microsoft's implementation of this. In fact, I'm so jaded at this point I'm not in the "Well, we'll see" camp I'm in the "don't even think about using this" camp. When Microsoft's got a few YEARS of demonstrating real support for standards then I'll start reconsidering their platform/browser as something other than an anti-competitive wedge.

Here's some wisdom for everyone to copy down: Never implement a feature invented by Microsoft until an open source product implements it *completely* and *successfully*. Their history is too full of broken implementations of their own "standards" to trust them not to A) break it, B) claim patent rights on it, or C) make it so obfuscated and difficult to duplicate the only way to ensure compatibility is to use Microsoft's own products.

- 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

Re:un, effing, real.

[Phroggy]

That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.

What do you want them to do: keep things the same from one version to another, or call it what everyone else calls it? Microsoft has called bookmarks "favorites" consistently in every version of IE that ever existed, and they are continuing to do so. Changing the name could be confusing to anyone who has never used a non-Microsoft browser. They've decided to remain consistent.

And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great,

They should have decided to call them "bookmarks" twelve and a half years ago, but they didn't. That decision is in the past; it's done. They may decide that the benefit of changing the name outweighs the benefit of remaining consistent, but they haven't reached that point yet. If Firefox, Safari and Opera continue to grow in popularity, I suspect Microsoft will reconsider this decision.

but why do they have to confuse their present customers by naming something else with that name?

What we're talking about here is renaming the Links toolbar to the Favorites toolbar. The Links bar is equivalent to what other browsers call the Bookmarks bar, so it makes perfect sense for IE to call it the Favorites bar. Currently, few IE users are aware that it exists at all because 1) they don't recognize the name, and 2) it's not prominently displayed by default (by default only the word "Links" is visible on the right side of the screen, and users don't know they can move it to where they want it).

Naming it the Links toolbar originally was, of course, a terrible idea; I believe that decision had something to do with a poorly-named feature in Windows Explorer that they were trying to integrate with. They did something stupid, and they're finally fixing it now.

Trying to change anything from its default has always been incredibly hard with a new version of IE because it's in a different place in the menu system with every release. Once it was under "file", once it was under "edit", once it was under "tools", and IIRC once it was under a menu that isn't in IE any more.

I'm assuming you're talking about the "Internet Options" menu item. It was originally under the View menu (consistent with the "Folder Options" menu item in Windows Explorer, which was logical to put under the View menu). In IE5, the Tools menu was added and "Internet Options" was moved there. This became the standard menu location for preferences across all Windows applications.

It's Apple you're thinking of who put Preferences under the Edit menu, and Netscape followed this standard on Windows and Linux. When Microsoft created their own standard location, other Windows applications (including Netscape) adopted it, except for anything made by Apple, which still puts Preferences under the Edit menu. Mac OS X, meanwhile, puts Preferences under the new Application menu (between the Apple and File menus, labeled with the name of the frontmost application), and has defined Command-, as the standard keyboard shortcut. Several Windows applications including Firefox have adopted the equivalent Control-, shortcut for Options, but I don't expect Microsoft to follow suit.

As for IE7, since by default there is no menu bar, there is only a Tools menu on the right side of the screen, and Internet Options is under that.

And I'm completely with you on the last part. I don't want my web browser opening a spreadsheet or word processing document! I don't even want it

A tribute to Top Gear

[gnarlin]

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.