Internet Explorer 8

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Windows Internet Explorer 8
IE8 Beta 2 in Vista
Developed by	Microsoft
Preview release	Beta 2, 8.0.6001.18241 / August 27, 2008 (2008-08-27); 3 days ago
OS	Microsoft Windows Vista, XP SP2 and 3, Server 2003 SP2, Server 2008
Platform	x86 (32-/64-bit)
Available in	English, German, Japanese, Chinese [1]
License	Proprietary (MS-EULA)
Website	Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8

Windows Internet Explorer 8 (commonly abbreviated IE8) is the next version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, succeeding Internet Explorer 7. A Beta 1 targeted for web designers and developers was released to the general public on March 5, 2008.^[2] Microsoft released Beta 2 (targeted for all consumers) on August 27, 2008.^[1] The final version is scheduled to be released in 2008. ^[3]

History

IE8 has been in development since at least March 2006.^[4] In February 2008, Microsoft sent out private invitations for IE8 Beta 1,^[5] and on March 5, 2008, released Beta 1 to the general public,^[6] although with a focus on web developers.^[7] The release launched with a Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit website promoting IE8 white papers, related software tools, and new features in addition to download links to the Beta.^[2][8] The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) added new sections detailing new IE8 technology.^[2][8][9] Major press focused on a controversy about Version Targeting, and two new features then called WebSlice and Activities. The readiness toolkit was promoted as something "developers can exploit to make Internet Explorer 8 'light up'." ^[2]

On August 27, 2008, exactly 7 years after IE6 was released (Aug 27th 2001), Microsoft made IE8 Beta 2 generally available.^[1] PC World noted various Beta 2 features such as InPrivate mode, tab isolation and color coding, and improved standards and compatibility compared to Internet Explorer 7. ^[10] Two name changes included Activities to Accelerators, and the Phishing filter to SmartScreen, both accompanied by minor technical changes as well. ^[11] Although, by summer 2008 the new feature called InPrivate had taken the spotlight. ^[12]

Version Targeting

Internet Explorer 8 was promoted as having stricter adherence to W3C described web standards, which as every IE version before it, was for some percentage of web pages, incompatible with the behavior exhibited by previous versions of Internet Explorer. As a result, web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions will break in IE8. This would have been a repetition of the situation with IE7, which having fixed a lot of bugs from IE6, broke pages which used the IE6 bugs to work around its non-compliance. This was especially a problem for offline HTML documents, which may not have been updatable (e.g. stored on a read-only medium, such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM).

To avoid this situation, Microsoft proposed Version Targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers.^[13] A browser with a newer version than what the page has been coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior holds true.

Microsoft proposed that a page with a doctype that triggers standards mode (or almost standards mode) in IE7 would by-default trigger IE7-like behavior (called "standards mode") in IE8 and future versions of IE. The new features of IE8, along with the breaking changes, could be enabled by explicitly using the X-UA-Compatible declaration to trigger what Microsoft called the "IE8 standards mode". Microsoft's reasoning was that by making the choice to opt for standards compliance explicit, pages that do not want the behavior will not trigger the IE8 standards mode.^[13] IE8 standards mode could also be triggered by the HTML5 doctype. Doctypes that trigger quirks mode in IE7 will continue to do so in IE8.

The proposal was met with much controversy. Jeremy Keith, writing for A List Apart, felt that tying pages to browser versions would greatly hinder progressive development as championed by web standards.^[14] Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software, authors of the Opera web browser, stated in an article for The Register that the move was an example of monopolistic behaviour due to Microsoft's dominating position in the web browser and operating system markets.^[15]

Peter Bright of Ars Technica claimed that the idea of using a meta tag to pick a specific rendering mode fundamentally misses the point of standards-based development, but positioned the issue as one of idealism versus pragmatism in web development, noting that not all of the Web is actively maintained, and that, "demanding that web developers update sites to ensure they continue to work properly in any future browser version is probably too much to ask."^[16]

On March 3, 2008, Dean Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had changed their minds, opting instead to make the IE8 standards mode (now called "standards mode") the default in IE8 (i.e., pages with doctypes that trigger standards mode in IE7 as well as newer doctypes).^[17] Version targeting would still be present but now would be used to opt-out of progressive development and use the IE7 standards mode. While this move was praised by many of the same people who had criticised Microsoft's original choice, including Microsoft's competitors,^[18] the subsequent release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 revealed that many web sites do not work in this new standards mode.

New features

The first beta release of IE8, which was demonstrated at the MIX08 conference, contains many new features, including WebSlices and Activities.^[20] In the second beta release, Activities were renamed to Accelerators.^[21]

InPrivate

A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with Beta 2, which consists of three main features: InPrivate Browsing, Inprivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscription^[22] The InPrivate Browsing mode was noted by PC World and others as having been described as a "porn mode", and by Informationweek as a " 'Stealth' Privacy Mode". ^{[23] [24]} Gregg Keizer of Computerworld says Private Blocking "notifies users of third-party content that can track browsing history", and that InPrivate Subscription allows" subscribing to lists of sites to block". ^[25]

Accelerators

Example of a map Accelerator using the IE8 Accelerators Smart tag.

Accelerators are contextual commands that allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page.^[26] Actions such as selecting the text or other objects will give users access to the usable Accelerator services (such as blogging with the selected text, or viewing a map of a selected geographical location), which can then be invoked with the selected object. According to Microsoft, Accelerators make copying and pasting between web pages easier.^[20] IE8 specifies an XML-based encoding which allows a web application or web service to be invoked as an Accelerator service. How the service will be invoked and for what categories of content it will show up is specified in the XML file.^[27] Similarities have been drawn between Accelerators and the controversial Smart tags, feature experimented with in the IE 6 Beta but withdrawn after criticism (though later included in MS Office).^[7]

This is an example of how to describe a map Accelerator using the OpenService Format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
    <homepageUrl>http://www.example.com</homepageUrl>
    <display><name>Map with Example.com</name><icon>http://www.example.com/favicon.ico</icon></display>
    <activity category="map"><activityAction context="selection">
        <preview action="http://www.example.com/geotager.html">
            <parameter name="b" value="{selection}" /><parameter name="clean" value="true" />
            <parameter name="w" value="320" /><parameter name="h" value="240" /> 
        </preview>
        <execute action="http://www.example.com/default.html">
            <parameter name="where1" value="{selection}" type="text" /> 
        </execute>
    </activityAction></activity>
</openServiceDescription>

Web Slices

IE8 Favorites menu displaying a WebSlice in a flyout Window

Web Slices are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to.^[26] Web Slices will be automatically kept updated by the browser, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals. Developers can mark parts of the pages as Web Slices, using the hAtom and hSlice microformat. Web Slices have been compared to Active Desktop, introduced in Internet Explorer 4 in 1997.^[28]

Autocomplete changes

The address bar features domain highlighting for added security so that the top-level domain is shown in black whereas the other parts of the URL are grayed out. Domain highlighting however cannot be optionally turned off by users or websites. Other features of the address bar include support for pasting multi-line URLs and an improved model for inserting the selection caret, and selecting words, or entire URLs in the Address bar. The inline autocomplete feature has been dropped from Internet Explorer 8.^[29]

SmartScreen Filter

This feature, titled SmartScreen Filter, is familiar to Internet Explorer 7 users. If you visit a site which has been labeled as an imposter or harmful to your computer, then Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported unsafe and you shouldn't visit it. From there, you can either visit your homepage, visit the site you previously came from, or continue to the unsafe page (which Microsoft states as 'not recommended'). Also, you will notice that when you are viewing more than one tab inside IE8, there are three different possibilities as to what the tabs will be colored: green, yellow, or red. These different colors signify the safety of each site. Green means that the site is safe and that you can browse it securely; yellow means that the site is okay, and that you should use caution but generally feel okay about browsing it; red means that the SmartScreen shield will appear prompting you to either visit your homepage, visit the site you previously came from, or continue to it anyways.

Favorites Bar

IE8 Developer Tools

Other new features in IE8 includes a redesigned Favorites Bar, which can now host content such as Web Slices, web feeds as well as documents, in addition to website links. The phishing filter has been augmented with Safety Filter that prevents sites known to spread malware from loading. Users need to make an explicit choice to load a blocked site; however this feature can be disabled using Group Policy. A crash recovery mechanism has been incorporated; if the browser crashes, web pages being viewed may be recovered, at the user's discretion, when the browser is restarted.^[26] Full-page zoom now reflows the text to remove the appearance of horizontal scrollbars on zooming.^[30] For developers, IE8 includes tools that allow HTML, CSS and JavaScript debugging directly from the browser.^[27]. It now also supports inline find as opposed to a dialog box.

Automatic Crash Recovery and LCIE

Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript runtime and the associated garbage collector. Circular Memory leaks, which resulted earlier due to inconsistent handling of JScript objects and DOM objects, have been alleviated.^[27] For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes. Glitches and hangs don't bring down the entire browser. It also leads to higher performance and scalability. Permissions for ActiveX controls have been made more granular - instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.^[30]

Rendering engine

IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards (like HTML, CSS and JavaScript) in standards mode.^[17] Such changes might cause it to break compatibility as it behaves significantly different compared to IE7.^[13] In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a special meta element into the web page, that triggers the "IE7 standards mode" in the browser, using:^[17]

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

While the behavior of the browser is unchanged from Internet Explorer 7 in "IE7 Standards Mode", in standards mode (the default IE8 rendering mode), IE8 supports Data: URIs, HTML object fallback, the abbr tag, CSS generated content and the display: table CSS rule, in addition to fixing a lot of CSS and HTML parsing bugs.^[31] As a result, IE8 Beta 1 passes the Acid2 test in IE8 standards mode (now called "standards mode").^[32][31] Also, the proprietary hasLayout property will be eliminated when using IE8 in IE8 standards mode.^[33] Microsoft has stated that Internet Explorer 8 will improve only some of the standards being tested by Acid3.^[34]

Compliance with the CSS 2.1 specification was a stated goal in Internet Explorer 8 by Microsoft, even including an attempt to support of CSS3 features. IE8 Beta 1 also partially supports CSS 2.1 Paged media (including the @page CSS rule and the left, right and first page selectors). In addition, it also supports the DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM) and the Selectors APIs. IE8 also adds cross-domain communication via the XDomainRequest object, that exposes a programming model similar to XMLHttpRequest. IE8 features an enhanced and standardized DOM, that brings it in line with implementations in other browsers. Attributes and properties in DOM objects are now handled differently, and the behavior of the getAttribute, setAttribute and removeAttribute modifiers have been changed to match the behavior of other browsers.^[27] Internet Explorer 8 also supports the Accessible Rich Internet Applications(ARIA) specification for enhanced accessibility in Ajax-based rich Internet applications.^[30]

Market & critical response

Beta 1 was noted by Paul Thurott in March 2008 as being "aimed a Web developers, not end users.", and that " ..didn't feel that typical users should be installing it" ^[35] By the release of IE 8 Beta 2 in August 2008, Beta one had achieved .03 % market share according to Net Applications. ^[36] A review of IE 8 Beta 2 by PC World summarized its thoughts on IE8 Beta 2 adoption with "While it likely won't convince many Firefox users to jump ship, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 may be worth considering for people who have not yet solidified their browser loyalties." ^[37]

Releases

References

External links

• Internet Explorer team blog
• Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
• IE8 Beta downloads
• Internet Explorer 8 Whitepapers
• Review of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 on PC Magazine
• Review of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 on Paul Thurott's Supersite for Windows
• Tutorial on Web Slices and Activities
• eBay WebSlice and Accelerator