Internet Explorer 8 RTW

The final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been released at last. I am not a big fan of alpha & CTP releases and never bother to install them and play around and read up stuff others have written about such releases - just to catch up with what is "in" and "out". However, I do play around with beta and RC versions only to some extent and did so on IE8 beta-2 and RC-1. The overall impression from these two was, yes, there are new features, more standards-based, existing features enhanced but it leaves a lot of websites esp. those make use of IE-specific features. The final release is more polished and of course does better than beta-2 and RC1; it also incorporates few changes over RC1, but it still leaves hundreds of websites render incorrectly in "pure" IE8 mode (both browser and document modes set to IE8). I fear this will only delay the adoption of IE8 at the enterprise-level and the internet community-wide thus leaving all the great new and enhanced features to be untapped or under-utilized.

Microsoft knew this problem and has given a "switch" to change the rendering mode between IE6, IE7 and pure IE8 - allowing users to select one that shows a website in its intended or best layout/design. This switch is available in the form of a browser setting (for end-users) and a <meta> tag specifying the rendering mode to be used for that page (for developers). Remember <meta> tag overrides user's setting in order to obey the developer's mandate of displaying the website in the way he/she intended irrespective of user's settings. Who knows a website better than its developers?

So, I installed the final IE8 on the very next day it was released and as I said already it has shaped better with few changes compared to RC1. I haven't experimented with all the new features/changes but based on my experience so far, here are my picks but you can find more about IE8 at the source.

• For Developers:
  • Full CSS 2.1 & partial CSS 3 support. As always, Microsoft does include few IE-specific extensions to the CSS 2.1 feature set but they are now identifiable with -ms- prefix (Firefox uses -moz- for its CSS extensions).
  • The first IE version to pass ACID2 test.
  • Support for data: protocol. I will cover this interesting thing in a later blog post.
  • IE Developer Toolbar now 'burnt' into the browser with more features in the name of Developer Tools. Touted to be what FireBug is to Firefox, but still behind FireBug.
  • Native support for JSON data exchange format. AJAX becomes much easier.
  • Support for (scriptable) DOM storage, part of HTML 5 standard, to persist data in user's local PC; a better-than-cookie model for offline features. While cookies are limited to 4KB, DOM storage allows more than 5MB per site.
  • Backward IE compatibility: If your website is incompatible with pure IE8 mode, you can place a <meta> tag specifying the browser version (IE 5.5, 6, 7 or 8) IE8 should use to render the page, overriding user's compatibility settings. See an image-based demo.
  • Includes a better source code viewer (built-in) showing line numbers and tag coloring.

• For End-users:
  • Browse without traces - called as "InPrivate" mode, the feature allows browsing websites without saving any information such as cookies, browsing history and form data. Good for those doing online money/credit card transactions esp. in public internet browsing centers.
  • Reopen closed tabs within the current browser session; you cannot open tabs closed in previous sessions. However, you can reopen pages that were open in the last browser session.
  • Better "Find on the page" interface.
  • Accelerators - context menus to exchange data with services (e.g.: currency converter, dictionary definition of the selected word, etc) - functionally similar to the mini toolbar in Word 2007. Surprisingly, Microsoft and others have published lot of free accelerators, search providers, toolbars, etc for IE8. See the IE add-ons site for the full list. As per my knowledge, none of the earlier IE versions had so many extensions right from their beta-stages.
  • Domain name (base URL) highlighting in address bar to easily identify the website currently being viewed.
  • As discussed above, IE8 has a switch to display IE8-incompatible websites in the way they are supposed to be (or as best as possible) rather than giving instant surprises. If IE8 finds the site being navigated to be incompatible, it flips the switch automatically and renders the site in best possible mode - saves users a few clicks if it is to be done otherwise manually. This compatibility information can also be specified explicitly using a <meta> tag inside <head> element that directs IE8 to render the page in that particular mode only. As of this writing, Microsoft home page has a <meta> tag to display it in IE7 compatible mode! J
  • Search suggestions - ditto of the 'Awesome Bar' feature in Firefox 3.
  • Visual Search - Along with suggestions, you also see a relevant image for each suggestion (not necessarily for all suggestions) if fed by the search provider. Try it: do a search using Amazon.com or Wikipedia search provider from the Quick Search Bar in IE8.
  • Web slices - call it 'Visual RSS Feeds', allow you to subscribe to specific sections on a webpage (as marked by its developers), get notified automatically when the subscribed sections updated & view the new content in a mini-window without visiting the site itself. Example: headiness (or specific sections such as Sports, Health, etc) on a news website, flight arrival/departure info, weather updates. Well, you get the idea. To see it in action, visit MSN in IE8 and hover the mouse cursor over the banner at the top-left corner of the main content area and you would see a green icon popping up outlining the web slice area (see below). Click that green icon and the rest should be obvious.

  

As you might have noticed, many of the new features are already present in other browsers; you can find almost every feature in at least one of Opera, Firefox, Chrome or Safari. The notable exceptions are Web Slices, DOM Storage and native JSON support. I do not know if any of the latest or currently-in-beta versions of other browsers support any of these exceptions.

Well, that's all for now.