Internet Explorer 8 Drops Today!
Posted by Tony
The latest web browser offering from Redmond has been released today. This coincides with Microsoft’s web developer conference, MIX09 (there’s also a live site), being held in Las Vegas. From this version of Internet Explorer, you can expect better web standards support, increased security, and a tweaked look.
Internet Explorer 8 has been in development since sometime in 2006 (as well as being in public beta for over a year) and is purported by the dev team to be one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market. And it’s true that an early beta version of IE8 passed the Web Standards Project’s ACID2 test (although it’s worth mentioning that other browsers have been passing this test with ease for quite some time already). That’s good news for web developers (like us) who typically have to wrestle with various versions of Internet Explorer to get it to render standards-compliant web pages correctly. We probably have our favorite browser - Mozilla’s Firefox - to thank for that, since their standards-compliant browser has been steadily eating into Microsoft’s share of the browser market.
Some of the improved security features include private browsing and better (the best?) malware blocking. Also touted are new features such as web slices and accelerators. Web slices allow users to save just a portion of a page that IE will keep updated (although I think this is dependent on the page developer marking a section off as a “slice”) and accelerators are a way for page developers to automatically include links to web services or sites in a context-sensitive way. I’ll have to check those features out more to really get a handle on what they can do.
Now I just need to figure out how to install IE8 side-by-side with IE7 for testing…
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