Microsoft last week released the first Beta release of the much discussed Internet Explorer 8. This is meant for Developers and web designers to get a first hand access to the new browser. If you are an eager web enthusiast who wants to try the Internet explorer 8 browser or a developer or a System admin then try this in your test or development environments. Do not deploy this browser yet into production in any organisation
The primary focus behind Internet Explorer 8 is making Internet Explorer 8 compliant standards, improve web experience and improve security.
Some of the features in Internet Explorer 8 (Beta now) is
Contextual Activity in website allows lookup information related to information in current page or send it to an external application
Web sites can expose portions of their page as a WebSlice that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web
Three different Rendering modes (Standard default). Quirks mode for legacy Internet Explorer browsers, Strict mode for Internet Explorer 7 & Internet Explorer 8 standards mode
Cascading style sheets 2.1 compliance
HTML improvements like seperate URL handling, get/set/remove attribute implemetations compatible with other browsers, Default attributes for HTML support
Improved NameSpace support for XML based standards compliant webpages
Platform performance improvements for subsystems like cascading style sheets rule processing, markup tree manipulation, the JScript parser, garbage collector runtime, and memory management
Builtin developer tools
Compatibility for existing websites
Improved Security including Enhanced protection from deceptive websites by improving Phishing filter
Safety Filter to protect against a broader set of online threats by analyzing the full URL string
Domain Highlighting showing the Top Level domain to confirm you are in the website you thing is the one you intended to visit.
To download Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), click here