IE8 out today
With a growing list of rivals in the browser space Microsoft will today release Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of its IE product. IE8 will be made available for download from the Microsoft site (http://www.microsoft.com/ie8) from 6pm South African time today (March 19).
The latest browser, which has been in public testing for many months, is Microsoft’s most standards-compliant browser to date as well as including a number of new features such as "web slices", private browsing mode and security enhancements.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser but it has recently come under pressure from a number of new competitors, including the open source Firefox browser and Google’s Chrome browser. Recent reports on browser market share have Internet Explorer showing significant losses over the past year – NetApplications estimates IE has lost around seven percent market share since April 2008 – while its main competitors have increased their claim.
New features
One of the more significant changes in IE8 is its stricter adherence to Web standards, which will please Web developers building new web sites but cause problems for older sites optimised for previous IE generations such as IE6. To address this problem, Microsoft has included a compatibility mode option which can be turned on to render older sites that don’t work properly in IE8.
Microsoft has also improved the security in IE8 to protect users. In particular it has focused on protecting users against ClickJacking attacks, in which users are tricked into following links they aren’t aware of. IE8 allows website owners to insert a header tag into the site so that users are warned if there is an attempted ClickJacking attempt.
A new feature introduced with IE8 are Accelerators, which are a form of selection-based action. With the appropriate accelerators installed users can highlight a piece of content on a site they are visiting and then either perform a search based on that, add the content to their blog or view a map of the area, for example. Microsoft has an already-extensive collection of accelerators for users to download and add to their browser and they range from social networking tools to news tools, search, email and translation tools.
The other new addition with IE8 are what Microsoft calls Web Slices. These "slices" are portions of a website that users can subscribe to. Once subscribed they can quickly monitor changes to that "slice" in their favourites bar. The developer of a website does, however, need to define the slices on a page that users can subscribe to.
Internet Explorer 8 discussion
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