2. Internet Explorer 8

The beta of Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t have all the features that will be in the next version of Microsoft’s Web browser, and it doesn’t have the new user interface planned for the final version. At this stage it’s a preview for developers, to encourage them to build sites that use new features like Web slices and activities. That may or may not be working the way the Internet Explorer team was hoping for, though: there’s already a Firefox extension to support both. And Chris Wilson admits that it’s hard trying to support HTML 5 when the standard hasn’t yet been finalized. “This is a question everyone struggles with. You can’t ship the standard, but you can’t ship an interpretation of it because people start depending on that interpretation. We expect we’ll probably have to change some things. But once we do invest in an area, we’ll try to invest in being involved in that part of the standard to see how firm it is. If it feels really squishy, we would like to take a different implementation strategy.”

Activities may remind you of Microsoft’s ill-fated smart tags, but Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for IE, says they’re different. With smart tags, the browser was trying to recognize pieces of information in the page on its own, where with activities, it’s only doing what you ask of it, using services you enable. Select text in a Web page and you get an “activity indicator”; click on that to see a list of services, like getting a map for an address or buying on eBay for a product, with a pop-up preview. You can choose which services you see; sites have to write the service, but Hachamovitch says the Open Service Specification is simple enough that a team at eBay took only an hour to get a working prototype.

Select anything in a Web page and activities try to offer something useful to do with it, from looking on a map to buying online.

Web slices also have to be coded by the Web developer; these allow you to subscribe to a section of a Web page in the same way you’d subscribe to an RSS feed. The site can control what you can subscribe to and what you see, so Facebook could let you subscribe to the status updates for your friends, and see them in the style of the Facebook site. Hachamovitch suggested this would be useful for the lead story on a news site, items you’re interested in on eBay, twitters from your friends, or sidebars on your blog.

Follow an auction on eBay in an Internet Explorer 8 Web slice.

Interactive Web sites like map services and online calendars make it hard to bookmark specific sections. For example, if you load a map and zoom in on it, you can’t easily copy the URL to get back to that view, and if you hit the Back button, it takes you to the previous site rather than zooming out again. With IE 8, developers will be able to write Ajax applications that let you step back through actions using history, and copy the URL for exactly what you see on screen. They will also be able to store information you’ve typed in on your PC if you lose your Internet connection; the browser will know whether you’re online or off, and a blog site could change the Publish button to Save so you don’t lose what you’re doing if you get disconnected. There’s also a new option for mashups, which allow a site to load information from separate domains securely, although the owners of a Web service will have to choose to allow it.

Internet Explorer 8 has a new layout engine, so it displays Web pages differently from IE 7. By default, it will also display Web pages by following Web standards, rather than the way they would have looked in previous versions of IE; this will make well-designed sites look better, but sites that took account of previous peculiarities in IE will now look odd. To get around this, there’s an Emulate IE 7 button that probably won’t make it to the release version. To help you design your site, the separate Developer Toolbar download is now built into the browser, so you can debug CSS pages, and see how other sites work. Hachamovitch cracked a joke about the problems with IE 7: “when we just started planning IE7, security was the key focus. And at the time, my kids would hear news about a site not working the way it should because of some security issues. And they’d ask me, ‘Daddy, did you guys break the Web?’ And most of the time I could honestly say, ‘No’. But, you know, Web developers might answer that question a little bit differently.”

The Internet Explorer 8 developer tools show what CSS styles affect any element on the page.

IE 8 will load Web pages faster, Wilson claimed. “A lot of performance isn’t actually our code sitting there spinning in a loop; it’s sitting there waiting for the page. Before, we only had two connections per page; we’ve increased that to six by default on a broadband connection.” Not only does the page download faster, but the browser will also start running scripts while the page is downloading, and Wilson quoted Gmail engineer Greg Badros as saying that scripts run two and a half times faster. He says the CSS and JavaScript systems have been improved. And he says IE will be more reliable, because when a tab crashes, it won’t affect other tabs in the same window; he demonstrated this by deliberately crashing a tab and then running the rest of his demo (including the Acid2 test) in the same browser window. If the browser does crash, it will reload all the tabs you had open.

He showed off other small changes. The address bar now highlights the domain in all URLs and grays out the rest of the path, to make it more obvious if you’re on a site that’s only pretending to be the legitimate site you were expecting. The dialog for managing browser add-ons splits them into Toolbars, Extensions, Search Providers, and Activities, and you can see ActiveX controls as well.