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."

Hmmm ...

[Der Einzige]

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

Re:Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman]

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:Broken links in the summary

[kellyb9]

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

Re:SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the trick. Microsoft have effectively been put on notice over ECMA script 4. [mozilla.org] That's interesting don't you think?

With SVG, Microsoft can either support it themselves (eg: via SilverLight) or expose a business opportunity to their competitors (eg: Adobe). Which does history say is the most likely? IE9 -- with just enough SVG support to hinder the format until Microsoft have a patented alternative to ram down everyones throat.

Re:Will someone please...

[tobiasly]

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.

Re:SVG

[smooth wombat]

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

[man_of_mr_e]

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:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[davidsyes]

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...

Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*?

[Bodero]

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.

Re:Will someone please...

[uhlume]

Take it up with the Microformats [microformats.org] folks. WebSlices are just an extension (and a fairly minor one) of the hAtom [microformats.org] microformat. Most of your objections to WebSlices could be applied to microformats in general, or to any framework (jQuery, for instance) that uses class attributes for non-CSS semantic purposes.

About the only difference I see here is that the browser itself knows to take advantage of a microformat, and hopefully it's smart enough not to generate false positives from CSS classes with the same name. I can quickly think of a couple of easy ways to make that determination: namely, 1) look for the other required elements of the microformat ("entry-title", "entry-content", etc.), and 2) look for a CSS definition matching the class name. If the the other required elements don't exist in the correct relationship to the matched class, and a CSS rule with the same name exists, it probably wasn't intended as a WebSlice. That seems simple enough, and reasonably bulletproof — and if I could come up with it that easily, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the IE8 team did as well.

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

[Shippy]

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:SVG

[gad_zuki!]

>Took me ages to find the bloody slide show button.
In every other Powerpoint it was a nice simple button in the corner of the window.

I support quite a few users and made the mistake of using a laptop with office 2007 for one of our large presentations with multiple presenters. This became a social experiment to see how my low-tech users would react. Hell, I almost fainted when two or three of them just found the play button in under 5 seconds and only one of them asked. So if these people can find it while doing a presentation in front of 150 people and you cant, well, you have no business posting on slashdot.