Better browsing from Microsoft
While Firefox and Opera are grabbing headlines with their latest browser releases, Microsoft is putting the final touches to version 8 of its browser. And unlike previous releases of the browser, which have annoyed users with their quirky renderings of Web standards, IE8 promises to be the most standards-compliant browser from Microsoft to date.
But, aside from standards compliance, IE8 is also expected to have a number of new features that promise to make IE8 a great deal better than its predecessors.
Crash recovery is expected to be greatly improved in IE8, so much so that developers are promising that even if a single tab crashes, the entire browser will not be brought down. That alone will make IE8 worth looking at, considering Firefox’s tendency of whole scale crashes when a single tab is not performing.
One of the things that has made Firefox so popular is the ability to include add-ons to the browser, keeping the base browser tight and giving users the option to include additional features as they want. IE8 is looking to make loading add-ons as secure as possible. Microsoft is hoping IE8 will make it easier to find and identify add-ons. It will also make it easier to remove faulty or suspicious add-ons.
Security
Security is always key when dealing with the Internet. IE8’s approach is to add multiple levels of security to the areas where security is most at risk. Among these is the use of ActiveX controls which can be used maliciously. IE8 adds the ability to control where and when ActiveX controls can be loaded and, most importantly, which users can load them.
One of the complaints about previous ActiveX control was that they generally required administrator privileges to be loaded. In IE8 individual users can load these without administrator intervention. The other major benefit of this is that is a malicious ActiveX control will only affect the user profile that installed the control and not the entire system.
As smaller devices become the norm for users accessing the Internet, IE8 includes much-enhanced zoom features. Instead of the fairly limited digital zoom feature of IE7, Internet Explorer 8 now uses a better "adaptive zoom" which promise better rendering of zoomed pages. The newer zoom features in IE8 also include the ability for persistent zoom and removing horizontal scroll bars to give more screen space.
Another critical element of the modern Internet is the need to access information across domains. So web mashups, for example – those sites that combine information from multiple sites – need a way to reliably pull information from multiple domains. With security in mind the challenge is to work out which domains as trusted and which are not. IE8 uses a new cross domain request (XDR) process that makes it easier for developers to access multi-domain data while making sure security is not compromised.
For users, IE8 promises to be faster and better at rendering web pages and a whole lot easier to use. And for developers the browser includes a good handful of features that promise to make it easier to develop for and more secure overall.
An IE8 developer beta is now out and a general public beta release is expected in August.
Internet Explorer 8 discussion
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