Internet Explorer 8 Beta Features Revealed 281
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."
SVG (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
I just this last week tried IE 7 for the very first time. As a user of IE 6, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and having used Every browser from lynx Cello and Mosaic up through the offerings of today, I am not unfamiliar with various browser styles, feel, ways of doing things. From my early experience with it, I can say that 7... to use a standard automobile analogy: The engineer is 5' 2". He designed the seat fixed in one position and not adjustable. The rearview mirror fixed in positon as well; Seat belt? forget it! He likes the parking brake in the back seat so that's how it is going to be.
Microsoft seems to have an irrepressible arrogance when it comes to design. They also seem to have a less then stellar competence in other areas. The former seems to be a fall back for lack ehibited in the later. IE 8 is from the same designers? No thank you
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
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In every other Powerpoint it was a nice simple button in the corner of the window.
I support quite a few users and made the mistake of using a laptop with office 2007 for one of our large presentations with multiple presenters. This became a social experiment to see how my low-tech users would react. Hell, I almost fainted when two or three of them just found the play button in under 5 seconds and only one of them asked. So if these people can find it wh
Re:SVG (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SVG (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you are referring to the little dropdown that shows up in pop up dialogs?
From a developer perspective (Score:5, Informative)
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 [languesvivantes.com]
- gif [languesvivantes.com]
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 [languesvivantes.com]. 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 [wikipedia.org], which is going to hobble AJAX development [slashdot.org].
Re:From a developer perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that's probably not the reason people are still on IE6. I work for a major Fortune 500 company, and we are all still on IE6. This post is brought to you on IE6. Why? Because businesses, especially large ones where all the people are, are really cautious to adopt new technologies. They want to be sure they will work with all the custom software they've written. In our case, some programs depended on very IE6 specific things, or were hacks of some sort, so we are STILL on IE6, and that's all that is supported here. And as a web developer, I have to develop in IE6 so I can see what my users will see. I would love to upgrade, but can't until the company moves us all forward. So that's probably why you have so many IE6 hits; anyone on a laptop issued by a large corporation is probably still using it.
Re:SVG (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SVG (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but millions of people want to turn off the one thing that annoys them, and for each of those people its a different thing..
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Of course we still have to support IE6 and IE7 for probably another ten years. IE6 still makes up 25% of the traffic my websites get and IE7 makes up another 50%.
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How do you guys deal with the requirement for transparency coupled with the requirement for more than a
Re:SVG (Score:4, Informative)
On a site I manage, Mira Public Observatory [www.mira.be] (Belgian Dutch site), I've used IE6-only conditional commenting of some javascript and a class attribute to replace the transparant PNG's with less attractive GIF's on IE6 browsers. On all other browsers, the script isn't run, so the images aren't replaced.
This doesn't actually slow down the site in any really noticeable manner for IE6-users, and not at all for anyone else (admittedly, I simply ignore IE5.5 and older, but by now that's less than 0.2% of my visiting audience). I've found this a good compromise, the IE6 users get a slightly slower and less pretty site, but the difference isn't huge and I expect them to die out in a few years anyway...
Re:SVG (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not always that they don't want to get rid of IE6 but rather, they can't because of their own web pages which have been hacked to work in IE6 or, as in my case, have applications that use a web interface and won't work with IE7 (or anything else).
I wish the folks who I work for would allow more people to install FF but we're a Microsoft-only place and so installing FF, or any other unapproved software, is verboten. Except in the case of where I work which fortunately is somewhat lenient in this regard. So long as we keep it updated, no problems.
The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.
This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs [wikipedia.org] or PHBs [wikipedia.org].
Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage [aleph.se] trying to protect their positions of power.
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because Microsoft pushes an update doesn't mean that the update has been tested with end-user systems. That is IT's job, and if IT finds that the update breaks critical systems that the business depends on, they won't push the update out until it is fixed.
Re:SVG (Score:4, Insightful)
I get the feeling that they're going down the path they have so many times before where there's one level of support for their version of something (in this case Silverlight) and a second-class level of support for "everybody else" (in this case SVG). So that if we do get some third-party to support SVG in IE via an approved MS mechanism, it'll be as an alternative to Silverlight.
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I wonder why there are any broken links, but the links for the XP and Server 2003 x86 versions are working. I, with x64 Vista, will have to wait for Windows 7 in 2009 for anything resembling OS support >.<
Broken links in the summary (Score:4, Funny)
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you are funny, but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)?
They did, and they do. The x86 download links for Windows XP and Windows Sever 2003 are working as of the time of this post. IE7 Beta1 was closed (I got my copy from a developers conference), IE7 Beta2 was public registration IIRC, and IE7 Beta3 was public.
Looks like they're doing the same thing - the alpha versions are given to their closed-
Hmmm ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Say I got an e-mail: "Hey, We're going to go to Tom's house tomorrow at 1 pm. The address is 123 Main Street, Anywhere USA". If I hover over "tomorrow at 1 pm" I get a popup "add to calendar" and if I hover over the address I get a "Map this address."
Crash recovery from firefox.
Who the hell has an excel document that is their 'favorite' and they'd want to launch from their "favorites bar"? I guess firefox does this already with file://.
Webslices
Crash recovery, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Crash recovery, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but that was low, even for Slashdot.
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Re:Crash recovery, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
It ain't hard (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery... (Score:4, Interesting)
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"...
Also, it's not due to arrogance. It does have some history behind it. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%28pronoun%29 [wikipedia.org]:
Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery... (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Re:Crash recovery, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, that's because I haven't used IE in the past 4 years.
Now with bonus crashiness! (Score:2)
Since, afterall, it needs it the most. But if one instance of IE blows up (historically, taking all other instances with it), does it open up as many instances were open and reload all the pages that died? Like those other two do?
WOW! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WOW! (Score:5, Funny)
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
the classic joke... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad they're going to be supporting all these 'new' standards.
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OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall!
Actually, this is something to look out for. For example, your company firewall may block google.com on port 80, but if you company does not block SSH connections, you can easily bypass it.
Simply setup PuTTY to create a localhost tunnel and establish a SSH connection to an outside source. All of a sudden you can browse the web through the encrypted tunnel. If you need a little more help for apps that open various ports or need to resolve the DNS externally, throw in SSHProxy and you can force all ports/DNS
Will someone please... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not holding my breath, though.
Re:Will someone please... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will someone please... (Score:4, Interesting)
About the only spec that Microsoft MIGHT actually be taking seriously is CSS2.1. And even then, I'm not holding my breath that they do a good job of it.
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your half million standards are obnoxious and useless.
ie6 is still the defacto standard, and MSFT is make a huge effort to get everything ready for your birthday with ie8.
now stop whining and get back to work.
Re:Will someone please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will someone please... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hardly. Reading the developer link reveals the following gem on an example for implementing WebSlices:
Wow... I hope there are no existing web pages that happen to use the CSS class name "hslice" for anything, otherwise they're in for an unpleasant surprise when IE8 begins interpreting them in their own special way!
So now the whole "IE8 will break existing sites" discussion comes into clearer focus. Microsoft's definition of standards-compliant (which should surprise no one I guess) is that their proprietary "extensions" now happen to be (X)HTML compliant.
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Did anyone notice that the value of the ID attribute in that example is invalid? (ID attribute values cannot start with a numeral.)
Overall though, I'm starting to like what I'm seeing with IE 8, especially now that my main complaint against the browser (having to opt-in for real standards support) has been consigned to the deepest darkest pits of Hell (and I don't mean the town in Michigan either).
Of course, I do reserve the right to reserve judgment until I can finally get around to playing with the b
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About the only difference I see here is that the browser itself knows to take advantage of a microformat, and hopefully it's smart enough not to generate false positives from CSS classes with the same name.
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It's really short. It says that IE7 implemented some things wrong, which were fixed, and listed some things IE7 didn't implement at all that IE8 does with a quick example and screenshot, and listed a couple of the same for implemented CSS3 features.
Besides which, do you seriously expect everybody who reads that webpage to have a clue what CSS2.1 compliance means? Perhaps it's best if they explained it...
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It'll all end in tears.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You select text, right-click, and then select an action (installed from some other provider in the same sense that search engines are installed into the search widget) which navigates using that text as part of a URL to another site. The concept just doesn't make sense when applied to Word documents (the closest thing
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un, effing, real. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:un, effing, real. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course these features already exists in other browsers, they know this, or they wouldn't have bothered. They left IE6 alone for ages until Firefox got a foothold. They're hardly going to put that in a way that makes it sound like its just a catch up exercise though, are they, it has to sound exciting and new. After all, to them, and most IE only users, it *is* new.
Actually, any improvement over IE's favorites system would be a good thing, I have to use it from time to time, and it's quite badly implemented.
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That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything
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That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.
What do you want them to do: keep things the same from one version to another, or call it what everyone else calls it? Microsoft has called bookmarks "favorites" consistently in every version of IE that ever existed, and they are continuing to do so. Changing the name could be confusing to anyone who has never used a non-Microsoft browser. They've decided to remain consistent.
And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great,
They should have decided to call them "bookmarks" twelve and a half years ago, but they didn't. That decision is in the past;
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I think the important bit is
They've only just added "WebSlices" (which look like they're poorly implemented because they'll show a button for people who can't install/use them) so it must be that that's the difference that now makes it "favourites" instead.
I guess it could be documents as w
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Safety Filter (Score:5, Funny)
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:Safety Filter (continued) (Score:2)
A thing we call "the embrace"
And we extend them 'til they gonna break
Leaving the real standards far behind
And we can innovate (Yea, right..)
/. now Microsoft propaganda pit? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Give me a fucking break, dude. And I'm not sure why you bolded fake Open Source operating system. Because CmdrTaco used a bad article title, you seem to be making some retarded implication that Microsoft is "pulling one over" on you and not really releasing something as o
AJAX Navigation Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AJAX Navigation Support (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Honestly. Who the hell cares if it's clever. It certainly is a feature that I can click back and forward in Ajax and have it work properly.
Re:AJAX Navigation Support (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think people who can't manage to beat out a couple of lines of pretty simple code are going to be able to write code for "AJAX Navigation support" and do it in a way which degrades gracefully?
The whole thing is something that will make life easier for web developers in the long term, but have little effect in the short term. What it won't do is magically make life any easier for end users.
ACR (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ACR (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I've tried for some time now figure out what's the idea behind thread per tab. And it seems to me there isn't any idea in that. And if you take under consideration that in Windows the whole messaging stuff is done in the context of the main thread there is really no idea to spawn threads for every tab. You'd still have to receive every message in one thread and then pass them to others and use nasty synchronization objects and stuff. Brrr.. I wouldn't want to implement that :)
Now process per tab and one co
Activities - more IE only "standards"? (Score:2, Informative)
Whats with all the change? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think MS will ever get it...
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Oh, wait...
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And IE 8 further improves security by improving its anti-phishing code.
Phishing are among the most problematic things that plague the web today, that's why IE 8 joins the crowd with Firefox and Opera here.
You may still not be satisfied, sure, but you smell and read like a troll.
Webslice sounds a lot like Apple's new widget (Score:2)
Beauty, they didn't even take a year to snag that feature and rename it.
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Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*? (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome back, Popups.
IE8 Features (Score:4, Informative)
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.
What's the most secure mainstream browser(for me)? (Score:2)
IE8 supports the latest features (Score:3, Funny)
I'm shocked! (Score:2)
Must be said (Score:3, Funny)
But does it work with Linux?
Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
IE8 Fails slashdot test (Score:4, Informative)
Has anyone else seen this issue?
A tribute to Top Gear (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [google.com]
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.
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Brett
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No IE8 will require WinFS (Score:2)
It is easy to promise features, but a bit harder to deliver them.
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