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."

Comments

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, 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.

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: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.

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
• gif

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. 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, which is going to hobble AJAX development.