
Internet Explorer 8 takes the Web experience beyond the page and introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the power of the Web whether you are a Web developer writing to standards, or an end user discovering a new online service. This beta release is available to everyone, but is primarily for Web developers and designers to test the new tools, layout engine, and programming enhancements.Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has been designed to make everyday tasks easier, provide dynamic security protection and improve the development platform and manageability. End user improvements include a streamlined interface, tabbed browsing, printing advances, improved search functionality, instant feeds (RSS), dynamic security protection, and more.
This Beta version of Internet Explorer is for web developers and designers. We invite you to use the resources listed below to learn about the improvements, changes and new features available in this release.
This release contains some great advances in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout, programming model, performance, reliability, usability and service integration. We are eager to ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 8 is seamless for you and your audience, and to give you a head start on using many of the new features with your sites and services. We encourage you to test your sites and services, and our platform implementation, and give us feedback!"
Developers and designers of all skill levels need great tools to deliver modern websites and write more efficient code without having to switch between the browser and a separate development environment. Internet Explorer 8 includes built-in tools that work well for professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.
Here are some end-user features you can expect to see in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1:
-Activities
-WebSlices
-Favorites Bar
-Automatic Crash Recovery
-Improved Phishing Filter
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.Activities typically involve two types of scenarios: "look up" information within a webpage or "send" web content to a web application. For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see the location of it. This is the form of a "look up" Activity where the user selects the address and views an in-place view of the map using his favorite map service.Activities ScreenshotAn example of a "send" Activity is a user reads an interesting article and wants to blog about a portion of the article. The user can select a portion of the article and uses the blog Activity. This navigates to the user’s blog site with the selection already available in the edit field.Activities are services that the user can install and manage. Users can install them from the Internet Explorer 8 Service Guide or through any website that advertises Activities.
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.WebSlice Preview ScreenshotInternet Explorer 8 Users can discover WebSlices within a webpage and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to the webpage, detects changes in the WebSlice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and click-through to the website to get more information.
In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.A user can easily add a link to the Favorites bar by using the Add to Favorites button and selecting the Add to Favorites Bar option.
Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.