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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."
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
You can download the latest browser from here: www.microsoft.com/IE8/download
Those features sound suspiciously like Mac OS X's Services menu and Web Clip widget. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
First they introduced tabbed browsing, now they've upgraded the context menus and integrated feeds! I just don't know how anyone can keep up with them. OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall! viva la revolution!
...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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
This is hysterical. 'WebSlices' are similar to Safari's Web Clip feature. Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox. (And Saft gives it to Safari.) And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new? In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So... it's called a "favorites" bar now so users will think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!" rather than the old "links" name which led users to think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!"? Ooh, and it can hold links to documents as well? Er, yeah, that makes a lot of sense... I've always felt that the biggest thing missing from a web browser was access to random local documents. Because there aren't enough other ways to access often-needed files.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
We can filter if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't filter and if they don't filter
Well they're no friends of mine
Seriously, is it supposed to look like that?
Microsoft: "Hey, wait for us - We're the leader!"
:)
I'm glad they're going to be supporting all these 'new' standards.
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.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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...
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...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm reading through the comments here and I can't believe my eyes. Boy, are you bitter, or what...
: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,
:) ) 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.
The features IE8 implements are a direct answer to what most users on Slashdot I've seen whine for years on an on, and still there's barely few mildly positive responses here, it's just so sad (for Slashdot).
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,
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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 feature. Some browsers, are starting to implement this, and now that IE is among them, those JS libraries can act as a simple proxy to the native Selectors API, and thus deliver substantial performance boost to pages doing lots of selections.
- 6 connections per host, versus 2. Before you start complaining how this will overload some servers: IE will start with 2 connections, and if it detects the connection is speedy, it'll build up to 6 dynamically. This means if you're being Slashdotted, for example, IE will detect this and keep connections 2 at a time.
- OBJECT tag was boosted to support all MIME types, using standard markup, the way other browsers handle it. That includes images.
- ActiveX plugins can now easily hook to an element namespace and provide rendering services, for example MathML, SVG etc.
- Cross-domain messaging and requests! This will make certain (safe!) application a *lot* easier. Currently the only workaround to safe cross-domain communication is a hack involving multiple iframes and hash manipulation. No more, this a really forward-looking of Microsoft to implement, hopefully the other browsers follow-suit.
- Sane versioning model, so if your site breaks in IE8 you can request IE7 mode via simple meta tag. The default would be the most compliant mode (as covered on a previous article).
- I've heard lots of whining here on Slashdot in the past about the circular memory 'leak' IE JS had. Now this is fixed. It's not as trivial as you might thing it is, and IE JS doesn't suffer alone from this problem (popular languages like PHP for example exhibit the same issue). A new garbage collector was implemented to fix this.
- Performance improvements to the CSS/HTML/JS subsystem will deliver speedier browsing without expected compatibility issues.
In keeping with this theme, I suggest that the IE8 name be dropped in favor of something to reflect just how up-to-date this new browser is. How about IE 2005?
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.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
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:
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.
-Shippy
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.
The Germans capitalize *all* their nouns, the arrogant bastards! What makes a noun so much more important than a verb? Nouns don't even *do* anything!
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Out of the box IE8 seems to have trouble with the CSS based login on the frontpage of slashdot.
Has anyone else seen this issue?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
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
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.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.