Pinoy Tech Guy

Written on Friday, 7th 2008f Mar 2008 – 9:59 am | by sylv3rblade | 393 views

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for free download on their downloads site. Note that this release is still in beta and is aimed directly at Web site developers, but on it’s free for anyone to try it out. And I assure you, if you’re sick of Internet Explorer killing how your favorite sites look try it.

You can download IE 8 from the Readiness Toolkit or the Product Page.

Internet Explorer 8 supports:

• Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
• Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition
• Window XP SP2
• Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64 Edition and Windows XP SP2 Pro x64 Edition

Minor Quirks

Compatibility for existing sites
Instead of cramming people into their standards (like in the past) Internet Explorer 8 now includes a more standards compatible layout engine that’s enabled by default allowing developers to build a single standards compatible website for multiple browsers (Less headaches ^^). It’s still a project in the works and my sites still look quite different in IE8 and Firefox but it’s a start.

CSS 2.1 compliance
It’s another project in the works but the IE8 layout engine is built to be cascading style sheets 2.1 compliant, enabling web developers and designers to write their pages once and have them render properly across all cascading style sheets 2.1 compatible browsers. However, Microsoft is not finished—hence, Microsoft is seeking feedback from developers working with Internet Explorer 8 Developer Beta 1.

HTML improvements
Many cross-browser inconsistencies have been fixed in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, including:

• Separate URL handing for attributes
• The get/set/remove attribute implementations are now compatible with those of other browsers
• Default attributes for HTML are supported so that they always exist on elements whether specified in the markup or not

Improved namespace support
Internet Explorer 8 simplifies the use of standards-compliant XML-based webpages that support namespace features like scalable vector graphics, XML user interface language, mathematical markup language, and others.

Improved security
Internet Explorer 8 will build upon Microsoft’s security and privacy investments to address users’ security concerns. In the months ahead, additional new protection, prevention, and privacy services will be added.

Safety Filter
Microsoft added a new enhanced protection for their user with Safety Filter, providing a more granular detection, and these prevention capabilities enable Microsoft to protect against more targeted and sophisticated attacks.

Domain Highlighting
Not really sure how helpful this is but what Domain Highlighting does is that it highlights the top level domain in the address bar. Guess it’s pretty useful to prevent phishing attacks mcbilly link here (you can at least check if you’re on the right site or not).

Import from Firefox

This is one feature that’s been quite useful in Firefox for quite sometime now, the ability to import items from your “other browser.”

IE8 allows you to import bookmarks and preferences. Here’s some screens of the bookmarks import process. Too bad RSS items you have bookmarked can’t be imported.

IE8 also detects and extensions you have installed on Firefox and tries to find similar IE add-ons. I stress on TRY because when I was redirected, it was the index page of the Windiws Live Marketplace. I guess it’s still a work in progress but I’m seeing good potential for it.

Activities

Activities give users ready access to the online services they use the most from any page they visit. It helps ease user experience by providing access easy to commonly used services. I’m hoping wikipedia gets added. Activities are typically:

• “Look up” information related to data in the current webpage
• “Send” content from the current webpage to another application

If you want to learn more about Activities, just watch this video.

WebSlices

RSS allows us to subscribe to content on a site but WebSlices allow to to subscribe on just parts of a service and enable users to monitor information they rely on as they move about the web. Think of it as an available widget on your IE8. At the moment, the only webslice I could find was the ebay one and I couldn’t get it to work. In my Opinion, Webslices will greatly improve Internet Explorer experience.

If you want to learn more about WebSlices, just watch this video.

Developer Tools

 

Firebug is essential for Web developers using firefox and Microsoft has it’s version of the tool completely integrated into IE8 with this button.

You can view the HTML, active CSS styles on a site and even any active scripts. Interesting huh?

Automatic Crash Recovery

I played around with ACR (Automatic Crash Recovery) since it’s a feature that’s been missing from the Internet Explorer line so I created an asp page that’s meant to crash IE (sorry can’t provide you the script. Might cause a lot of trouble). According to Microsoft, ACR can recover browser tabs to “prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. Nothing worse than having ALL your windows close by opening a page right? ACR reloads a Tab (yes, just a Tab, not the whole program) and tries to recover until forever. It’s good if the site was just experiencing a glitch but my script killed IE. I had to go to Task Manager and kill the process because ACR was doing endless loops of crashing and recovering. A prompt to continue or stop would’ve been nice.

Conclusion

In comparison with IE7, IE8 actually performs faster, not as fast as my Firefox Portable but fast enough. It’s still in Beta so most of the optimizations aren’t in place so it’s still quirky but I think it’s worth it. It’s good enough to replace my IE7 installation. The verdict? IE still isn’t a perfect product but Microsoft is on it’s way to doing it right

If you're new to Pinoy Tech Guy, you may want to subscribe to the site RSS feed for your RSS reader or for regular updates straight to your inbox, you can subscribe via email.