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

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 ...

Crash recovery, eh?

[religious freak]

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.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Unlike Firefox, I haven't had IE crash at all in the past 4 years.

Oh yeah, that's because I haven't used IE in the past 4 years. :-)

WOW!

[quaketripp]

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!

Re:WOW!

[MrNemesis]

Hey, we can at least be thankful that they didn't move the "back" button to the bottom right hand corner, remove the option to configure connection settings from within the app itself, reverse the direction of scrolling (i.e. scroll right and left to go up and down and vice versa), raster bitmaps and GIF files in CMYK as opposed to RGB and turn sentences begining with prepositions into French swearing. All these new UI paradigms we're missing out on!

In a rare moment of originality, a young MS exec, having just read the hitch hikers guide, sent a binary of IE7 back in time in an attempt to sue the companies developing firefox, opera and a million and one other more inventive browsers in the future for copying IE's features. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the new IE interface as a crude hoax perpetrated by 4chan, and the budding young exec was made Ballmer's personal chair man.

Not that I think the IE7 interface is an abomination of consistency and style or anything ;)

un, effing, real.

[sootman]

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.

Safety Filter

[losethisurl]

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

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.

the classic joke...

[Tumbleweed]

Microsoft: "Hey, wait for us - We're the leader!"

I'm glad they're going to be supporting all these 'new' standards. :)

AJAX Navigation Support

[jeremyds]

One of the more interesting features included with IE8 is "Ajax Navigation":

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log. This is actually a proposed standard in the HTML 5 specification and it's nice to see Microsoft implementing it. The inability to bookmark or navigate to a page that's been updated using AJAX has always been a pain in the ass.

Whats with all the change?

[flowpoke]

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...

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.

Re:SVG

[ianare]

Uh, wouldn't having an unchanging interface make a window easier to forge? You can just grab a screenshot of IE7, having full confidence it will look exactly the same for everyone.
Maybe you are referring to the little dropdown that shows up in pop up dialogs?