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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 - the developer perspective

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta - Making the Web Work For You

Earlier this month at the Mix ‘08 conference in Las Vegas the Beta release of the newest version of Internet Explorer was announced. There was particular developer excitement around this release given that the core focus for Beta 1 has been developer experience. In the following write up I will look at some of the key changes coming through with this version and also encourage you to download the new beta and start experiencing it.

One of the first things to note about the new browser is the strong focus on standards based rendering which includes not only improved CSS 2.1 support (and also a look towards the future with CSS 3.0) but also provides better support for various Html namespaces. As part of this the Internet Explorer product group has contributed more than 700 test cases to the W3C CSS working group – these tests are provided to build a comprehensive testing suite for CSS and also help resolve some ambiguities in the CSS specification thus benefiting web designers and developers.

Moving on, one of my favorites is a new feature called 'Activities' which is exposed via the context menu when content is selected on the web page being browsed. The feature allows for specific action to be taken on the selected content, thus improving the user experience. The activity is represented as XML - the key elements being homepageUrl, activity and display. Activities provide an ideal way for services to integrate with the user’s browsing workflow.

Another interesting feature is the concept of subscribing to a specific part of a page on web site with the help of "WebSlices" - the content is added to the Favorites bar and the user is presented with updates and notification of changes along with the possibility of expiring the WebSlice (which can be handy for auction based content or news postings). The WebSlice Format specification is available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

There are numerous other features that are part of the Beta and I would highly recommend you to take a deeper look at the core features of the Beta by starting at the landing page. Another important thing to remember is that given the standards related changes between IE7 and the IE8 Beta, some of the sites that run correctly on IE7 might not appear optimal on IE8. In the short term this can be reverted by adding the following meta tag to the rendering: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" /> Or by setting the following HTTP header: X-UA-Compatible: IE=7; . These are workarounds but a more permanent fix would be to ensure that the html being outputted by the page is standards compliant.Some very useful links are for the Developer forum and the Beta newsgroup site which is a good place to provide feedback regarding your experience with IE 8 Beta.

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