This article contains information about Internet Explorer 8 Beta
2. For up-to-date information, see What's New
in Internet Explorer 8.
There are many new features in Windows Internet Explorer 8
that will excite both end-users and developers. Features such as Accelerators
and Web Slices enhance the user experience, while the improved Phishing Filter
helps keep users safe. For developers, strong Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and
HTML compatibility, enhancements to ActiveX controls, and greater Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML (AJAX) interoperability provide opportunities to bring new
experiences to users.
Features for Users
Accelerators
Accelerators are contextual services that quickly access a
service from any Web page. Because users typically copy and paste from one Webpage
to another, Windows Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators has made this common
pattern easier to do.
The Accelerators feature performs two main functions: it "looks
up" information within a Web page and "sends" Web content to a Web
application. For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see
its location. During this "look up," the user selects the address and
views an in-place map, using his favorite map service.
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An example of a "send" Accelerator is a user reads
an interesting article and wants to blog about a portion of it. The user selects
the portion and uses the blog Accelerator. This navigates to the user’s blog
site, with the selection already available in the edit field.
Accelerators are services that the user can install and
manage. Users can install them from the Windows Internet Explorer 8
Service Guide or through any Website that advertises Accelerators.
Web Slices
The Web Slice is a new feature in which Web pages connect to
their users by subscribing to content directly within a Webpage. Web Slices
behave just like feeds, where clients can subscribe to get updates and are notified
of changes.
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Windows Internet Explorer 8 users can discover Web Slices
within a Webpage and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the
Address bar for easy access to links. Windows Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to
the Webpage, detects changes in the Web Slice, and notifies the user of
updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and
click through the Website to get more information. For example, a Web Slice
could be used for an item up for auction on an auction site. A Web Slice on the
page would let you subscribe to receive updates on a set-time basis and notify
you of price changes.
Favorites Bar
In Windows Internet Explorer 7,
the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. For
Windows Internet Explorer 8, the Links bar has undergone a complete makeover.
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 items, such as links,
feeds, and Web Slices as well as documents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
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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.
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Automatic Crash Recovery
The Automatic Crash Recovery
(ACR) feature of Windows Internet Explorer 8 can help prevent the loss of work
and productivity in the unlikely event that the browser crashes or hangs. 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.
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See Automatic
Crash Recovery white paper for more information.
Improved Phishing Filter
Windows Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter,
a feature that helped warn users when they visited a phishing site, that is, a
spoof of a trusted legitimate site with the intention of stealing the user’s
personal or financial information. For Windows Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft built
on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called
the SmartScreen Filter.
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Features for Developers
Accessibility
In response to the increase of
user interface (UI) complexity on the Web, the Web
Accessibility Initiative .gif)
group
has defined a roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), which
introduces ways for Web site authors to define how custom UI elements are
accessed. ARIA accomplishes this by defining a set of HTML attributes that map
back to common UI controls. As a result, users with disabilities can access Web
sites with a rich interaction model. By exposing ARIA through the Microsoft Active
Accessibility API in Windows Internet Explorer 8, assistive technologies
that already use Active Accessibility can also support ARIA easily.
The alt attribute is no longer displayed
as the image tooltip when the browser is running in IE8 Standards mode.
Instead, the target of the longDesc attribute is used as the tooltip
if present; otherwise, the title is displayed. The alt
attribute is still used as the Active Accessibility name, and the title
attribute is used as the fallback name only if alt is not present.
For more information, see What's New for Accessibility in
Internet Explorer 8.
ActiveX Improvements
Windows Internet Explorer 8
offers greater control over who can install Microsoft ActiveX controls and on
which sites they are allowed to run.
Per-site ActiveX
- Nearly half of all ActiveX controls meant to run
on only one site do not use any form of site-locking technology. This means
that many controls are not secure by default and could be misused by malicious
Web sites. To prevent this, Windows Internet Explorer 8permits users to decide
whether to allow ActiveX controls to run on a site-by-site basis.
Non-administrator
installation
- Standard users (i.e., those without
administrator privileges) can install ActiveX controls to their user profiles
without a UAC prompt or administrator involvement of any kind. In the event
that a user does install a malicious ActiveX control, only the user profile is
affected; the system itself is not compromised.
AJAX Enhancements
AJAX is changing the way Web applications are built. Windows
Internet Explorer 8 brings new functionality to the XMLHttpRequest
object that enables AJAX applications. These functions include:
- AJAX Navigation. Client requests that do not
trigger traditional page navigation can now update the
property, which allows the button to function appropriately.
- Connection Events. Where reliability is of top
concern, AJAX applications can exit gracefully if the call is canceled or times
out.
- Cross-Domain Request (XDR).To address the
limitations of existing mashup development, Windows Internet Explorer 8
introduces the XDomainRequest object to allow restricted and secure
communication between untrusted modules in the page. The browser shields the
user from potential threats, while allowing powerful cross-site interaction.
- Cross-Document Messaging. Documents in different
domains can securely exchange data using .
- More Connections. Windows Internet Explorer
8 raises the number of connections per host by default, for a potential drop in
page load times and increased parallelism in AJAX scenarios.
For more information, see the
following documents.
CSS Compliance
Windows Internet Explorer 8 is
the most CSS-compliant release yet. Here are some highlights.
- Data Uniform Resource Identifier(URI).This
mechanism allows Web page authors to embed small entities directly within a
URI, rather than using the URI to identify a location from which to retrieve
the entity. This is primarily of interest for small images (such as bullets)
used within CSS or layout.
- New Pseudo-Classes. The following are new to
Windows Internet Explorer 8:
:before
and :after
pseudo-elements allow authors to specify the location of dynamic content
relative to an element’s document tree content.
:focus
refers to when a user makes an element active so it can perform its task. This
pseudo-class applies while an element has input focus.
Outline enables
elements to be highlighted without affecting their size. It is a shorthand property for outline-color,
outline-style,
and outline-width.
Printing. The following properties have been added to ease
printing:
- page-break-inside
- widows
- orphans
Table Layouts. For many years, tables were the preferred
layout mechanism on the Internet. With Windows Internet Explorer 8, it is now
possible to apply table-style formatting to non-table elements, using the display
attribute. In practice, CSS tables are more permissive than HTML markup; tables
created with CSS rules will nest elements to become valid, whereas tables
created with HTML will close containers to avoid unexpected nesting.
For more
information, read the following documents.
Developer Tools
Windows Internet Explorer 8’s enhanced Developer Tools
expose the internal elements of Web pages to help research and resolve problems
involving HTML, CSS, and script. The tools included are as follows:
- CSS tool, which displays various rules defined
by style sheets that are loaded by your Web page.
- Script debugging, a built-in lightweight
debugger that lets you set breakpoints and step through client-side script
without leaving Windows Internet Explorer.
- Version mode switching, which allows you to switch
into different browser modes to test content for standards compliance.
- Profiler, a built-in tool to show where the
browser spends most of its time in execution so Web page authors can focus
optimizations.
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For more information, read the following documents.
Document Compatibility Mode
Windows Internet Explorer 8 has
made deliberate investments in building a new layout engine with full CSS 2.1,
strong HTML 5 support, and interoperability fixes for the Document Object Model
(DOM). The highest level of standards support is on by default. Website
authors can select EmulationIE7 mode
rendering in Windows Internet Explorer 8 with the following META tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
For more information, read the following
documents.
DOM Storage
Storing Web application data within a local cache opens up
new possibilities for a future class of Web applications by storing and loading
user data directly onto a user's hard drive. The future of AJAX will extend its
reach beyond client-server
interactions and into local data storage that is addressed from any Web page
and interpreted by the client Web browser. A Web application can write to local
storage when disconnected from the Internet and synchronize local changes when
an active Internet connection returns. A scriptable online-offline connectivity event
fires on connection-status change and will be available to all pages.
See also Introduction
to DOM Storage.
HTML Improvements
The new HTML 4.01 implementation
is now much more interoperable. These improvements include the following:
- The
tag image fallback is interoperable with other browsers. For example, an
tag without dimensions is now the same size as the image instead of 0 x 0
pixels.
- The
element submits its
attribute instead of its ,
which means the element for cross-browser
scenarios can now be used.
- The
method is now case sensitive and no longer searches incorrectly using the
attribute.
- The
method is now case insensitive, which means "camel case" (e.g.,
"camelCaseWord") is no longer necessary to specify attributes. It
also correctly identifies HTML attributes such as
and .
For more
information, read the following documents.
Protected Mode Cookies
Protected Mode restricts file writes to low-integrity
locations, including cookies. In Windows Internet Explorer 8, medium-integrity
applications can access low-integrity cookies without user interaction by using:
As always, applications that use cookies downloaded from the
Internet should assume these cookies contain malicious data.
Selectors API
Use the power of CSS selectors to rapidly locate DOM
elements. The API introduces two methods, selectElement
and selectAllElements, that take a
selector (or group of selectors) and return the matching DOM elements. With
these methods, it is easier to match a set of element nodes based on specific
criteria. The Selectors API provides significantly faster performance over
non-native implementations.
For more information, see Selecting
Objects With JavaScript.
Tab Isolation and Concurrency
In Windows Internet Explorer 8, the browser frame is
"loosely-coupled" with the tabs inside it. This means that pages that
use Protected Mode as well as those that don't may be hosted within the same
instance of the browser. Additionally, glitches and hangs don't bring down the
entire browser, thereby ensuring that poorly written extensions do not
significantly impact the performance or reliability of Windows Internet
Explorer 8.
