03/05/2008, 6:40pm, EST
Wednesday, March 5th
IE 8 takes on Safari with 'Activities,' more
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) beta, a test version of the company's free Web browser that will compete for dominance with Apple's Safari browser and Firefox. IE 8 features 'Activities,' or contextual services that provide quick access to a service -- such as 'look up' or 'send' -- from any Web page. Activities for example could allow a user to select the address of a restaurant and display an in-place view of the map using a favorite map service.
Another feature, dubbed 'WebSlices,' allows websites to connect to users by subscribing to content directly within a page itself. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify users of changes. Internet Explorer 7's 'Links bar' has been renamed to the 'Favorites Bar,' which has undergone a complete makeover, according to Microsoft.
Automatic Crash Recovery -- or ACR -- helps to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the event of the browser crashing or hanging. ACR takes advantage of the 'Loosely-Coupled' Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities like tab recovery, minimizing interruptions to browsing sessions.
An improved 'phishing' filter helps warn users when visiting a known phishing site. IE 8's phishing filter includes a feature called the 'Safety Filter,' which continues to block known phishing sites as well as sites known to contain malicious software that could harm users' computers or steal information. The Safety Filter also operates more quickly than before, according to Microsoft.
Finally, new Group Policy options are available to IT administrators, allowing them to remove the user-override option and fully block access to known unsafe sites.
Filed under: industry, software
Other story tags: Microsoft, Safari, internet, browser, Firefox, beta, web, Internet Explorer
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For crying out loud. This just gets worse and worse. How about someone creates a virus that removes IE from all machines and installs firefox or safari instead.
I guess that wouldn't really be a virus, more of a godsend. ;-)
S-T-A-N-D-A-R-D-S. do they not own a dictionary in redmond?
I wish they'd focus those development resources on an actually improved Mac Office product with real feature parity in Entourage and a real OOF translator that handled all the Office suite documents. :P
Keep up, will you. They announced in the last couple of days that they will default to standards mode.
It's too early to say now if IE8 will take some of the market slice back to MS, but I will give it a try.
About whole 'standard compliant' thing: w3c is a host of reference standards, and in early internet days they were nothing more than yet another view on how web pages supposed to be coded, while IE and Netscape compliance were the true standards because they represented the majority of internet content. I've heard too many web developers cries back then, because along with 'real browsers' they had to support some 'stupid Opera' as well.
Therefore a note to all standard developers: if you want it to become a real standard first make sure that other developers will support it from day one.
And let's face it - any "feature" which they add will be like all MS "features" which they don't steal from some other developers - bloated, slow, unneccessary, unneeded, poorly implemented, and in some way will screw the user over.
Doofuses.