Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 was released to the public on Wednesday, March 5, 2008.
The installation time seems somewhat excessive – about 20 minutes!
One of the first things you should know is if you plan on trying I.E.8 you cannot go back to I.E.7 it is replaced with version 8 so if you use something like FireFox you are OK but if you use I.E.7 forget it although there is a version 7 emulator.
For some strange reason after the install some of my links would not work properly. I am not the greatest fan of beta software but this is very disappointing.
Here are some of the features with I.E.8
WebSlices
Well this ‘New’ feature isn’t that new! It is a feature that was called Channels back in the v4 days. Microsoft says - "Users commonly visit many websites several times a day to check for updates. The introduction of RSS feeds can make this experience easier for users, although RSS feeds requires a nontrivial amount of work on behalf of the developer. WebSlices is a new feature for websites that enables users to subscribe to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds in that users can subscribe to them and receive update notifications when the content changes. Websites are polled at user-defined intervals, similar to the way RSS feeds are polled. Website operators may also define a minimum wait time between polls to minimize requests” OK, explain that to me again please!
Activities
The next ‘New’ feature I looked at was ‘Activities’. Again I.E. and Firefox have had add-ons that perform the same functions for years. Microsoft says - "Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. Activities typically involves one of two types of actions:
“Look up" information related to data in the current webpage
"Send" content from the current webpage to another application.
Web Standards
I.E. 8 is designed to conform to strict web standards which apparently is decided by a group of people - Who? So now I.E.8 according to Microsoft is fully Web Standards compliant. I wish I could explain that better but I cant, maybe somebody can explain it to me. "Internet Explorer 8 is designed to work in standard mode out of this box. However, Microsoft provides a way for users to browse the web in a way similar to Internet Explorer 7 by using the emulate Internet Explorer 7 button on the chrome." Chrome, for those that do not know, means it’s on the ‘Toolbar’
One good feature is the crash recovery feature. Yes I know its been a feature in Firefox for quite some time and that it was about time for it to be included in I.E.
So now you can go back to where you were if your browser crashes. With all that said, I am going to stick with SeaMonkey at least until they iron out a lot of the kinks.
You can read more and download I.E.8
here.
Alan Wade
