Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8

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Krazy Bluez

Banned to Spam
Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8


Improved security, increased standards support, and an overhauled UI are among the browser's most significant features.



Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will release the latest version of Internet Explorer at noon Pacific time on Thursday, bringing major changes in a bid to hold onto the browser's dominance and fend off an increasingly crowded field of browsers, including the still-surging Mozilla Firefox. Internet Explorer 8 brings to the table a number of new user-friendly features, increased standards support, and much improved security. The browser has been downloaded tens of millions of times since it entered public testing mode a little more than a year ago, constituting one of Microsoft's largest beta tests ever. Improved security is one of IE8's most significant features. NSS Labs released an independent study early Thursday showing IE8 significantly besting Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera in catching and blocking malware. With its SmartScreen filtering, IE8 Release Candidate 1 caught 69% of malware, while Firefox 3.07 caught only 30%.




In telemetry from beta testers, Microsoft has found malware to be a common occurance -- one IE8 user in 40 has gotten a malware block, while 1 million users per month are prevented from browsing to phishing sites. IE8 also contains a number of other security features, including an InPrivate Browsing mode that keeps no trail of browsing history and new features that prevents certain cross-site scripting attacks, click-jacking, and the installation of malicious ActiveX controls.
Nevertheless, a hacker successfully hijacked a machine running the IE8 release candidate and Windows 7 beta -- competitive browsers were hacked, too -- in a contest at the CanSecWest security conference on Wednesday.
The user interface in IE8 has been overhauled, adding new features such as color-coded browser tabs to group recently opened tabs together, the ability to recommend sites, a new visual search feature that allows users to see pictures of things such aseBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) results, auto-completion of searches and URLs, and a toolbar like Mozilla Firefox's for searching within a page. New tabs also show commonly visited Web sites as links, and tabs work in isolation so that if one tab crashes, the entire browser doesn't.
Throughout the testing process, Microsoft has focused most heavily on two new usability features, Web Slices and Accelerators. Accelerators let users perform actions like translation, mapping, and search from the right-click context menu, which brings up a window inside the current page to show translated text, a map, or search results.
Web Slices, which requires work on the part of site developers and therefore are still few and far between, let users create a link on their favorites bar, which brings up only a small portion of a Web site such as a condensed local weather forecast.
Microsoft claims that IE8 is faster or as fast as its main competitors, though the claim is debatable since Microsoft itself did the tests. The company released a high-speed video last week showing highly trafficked Web sites loading side-by-side in multiple browsers; IE8 came out ahead more often than not. Still, Microsoft isn't overplaying its hand here, simultaneously raising and downplaying the results. "These differences come down to milliseconds," Hachamovitch said.
The other significant -- and controversial -- new feature in IE8 is standards support. While developers and standards advocates have long complained that IE didn't support Web standards well enough, standards support comes at a cost, namely compatibility. In IE8, Microsoft includes both a legacy browsing mode and a standards browsing mode so that non-standard sites still load.
Developers can add a tag to their sites letting IE know if the site should be opened in standards mode or compatibility mode. Microsoft also maintains a blacklist of standards-mode incompatible sites.
IE8 will be available at launch in 25 languages, for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. However, IE8 won't be available for the Mac.



Source :*www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215901126&subSection=Browsers
 

victor_rambo

हॉर्न ओके प्लीज़
Improved security, increased standards support, and an overhauled UI are among the browser's most significant features.
यह सब तो कहने की बातें है | हम सभी असलियत जानते हैं की इंटरनेट एक्सप्लोरर एक निहायती घटिया और बेकार ब्राउज़र है | वैसे मैने तो यह भी सुना है की यह आखरी बार हैं|. इसके बाद माइक्रोसॉफ्ट इस ब्राउज़र का उलथा नही बनाएगी| चलो, अक्चा हुआ|
 
विक्टर रैम्बो जी, थोडा ट्राई तो कीजिये, इतना भी बुरा नहीं है :d वैसे ये हिंदी का शौक कैसे हुआ आपको, बराहा आई एम ई इस्तेमाल कर लिया क्या? :d
 

gxsaurav

You gave been GXified
यह सब तो कहने की बातें है | हम सभी असलियत जानते हैं की इंटरनेट एक्सप्लोरर एक निहायती घटिया और बेकार ब्राउज़र है | वैसे मैने तो यह भी सुना है की यह आखरी बार हैं|. इसके बाद माइक्रोसॉफ्ट इस ब्राउज़र का उलथा नही बनाएगी| चलो, अक्चा हुआ|

Do U know it was Microsoft which released EOT format of Web fonts long before any other browser had support for Web Fonts.

The internet & its standard which you see today are largly developed my Microsoft & Internet Explorer
 

ishanjain

Broken In
Recently an incident happened to me regarding this which i want to share with you guys....

I am designing a website for IP university(see my siggy) but i didnt bother about applying all those methods which passes all the w3c validations so that the site could be opened easily on older browsers easily. When i am done with my designing part, i showed it to all my friends. Now everybody knows that generally girls are not intrested in all the technical stuff. I showed the site to one of my fiend having a Dell pc --> original vista which is regularly updated. When i ask for her review, she was like ," Yaar frankly, the design is not good". Thats so dissapointing to me. She then asked me whats this suckerfish menu. I couldnt get it.... How the hell she can see that menu. I asked her for a screenshot (wasted 15 mins in just telling her whats a screenshot and how to use it). This is what she got on her IE.

*i427.photobucket.com/albums/pp351/ishan_jain80/crapiedumbsrishti.jpg


I was literally banging my head on the table on seeing this. Want to know why??
Just check out the design of my site only on firefox or opera and see the difference yourself.
 

tarey_g

Hanging, since 2004..
I am impressed with this new version , ajax/JS things run far better then the previous version, page load times are impressive. Our webapp (which is heavy on ajax and scripting) ran like 100% slow on IE as compared to FF. Now its rendering like charm on IE8, in some cases pages load faster than FF and in some FF is better. I am impressed and happy that IE8 is a major improvement over last versions.
 

expertno.1

Technomancer
Jai Ho ........


I am seeing IE 8 to be improved a lot , its very fast from before and i haven't found any bug now . But then also who will shift to IE ............?

IE is only for cyer cafe walas :grin !
 
IE8 definitely has many added feautures. Though in my opinion only "In-Private browsing" is unique!

also, the problem with IE is that it hangs up too often!
 

tarey_g

Hanging, since 2004..
^^ Feature is not unique ;) , but such features are welcome. The only major thing that IE8 lacks is a addon developer community link Mozilla.
 

demoninside

In the zone
well I use IE, Firefox and Opera, I use firefox all the time but company just stuck with IE. I would check IE8 but still nothing come close to firefox. But still i guess this is just a matter of choice who likes what.
 
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