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: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.

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.