Internet Explorer 8 Beta Features Revealed 281
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not holding my breath, though.
It'll all end in tears.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:-1, Insightful)
Interesting. And if Microsoft were to, say, buy Yahoo, then Yahoo wouldn't be able to sue them for patent infringement.
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:2, Insightful)
AJAX Navigation Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It'll all end in tears.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:1, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:SVG (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whats with all the change? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think MS will ever get it...
Re:Will someone please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will someone please... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you are referring to the little dropdown that shows up in pop up dialogs?
Re:AJAX Navigation Support (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
It ain't hard (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
"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?
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.
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.
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.
Re:un, effing, real. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.