Internet Explorer 8 Arrives with Developer Tools, Accelerators, Web Slices and More

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Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote at MIX09 marked the official release of Internet Explorer 8. He's responsible for the development of IE8. 

Internet Explorer 8 provides enhanced security and performance, making it faster and easier for people to complete common tasks online. For developers, IE 8 ships by default as Microsoft’s most standards compliant browser and benefits from work the company is doing with standards bodies to bring increased measurement and consistency. 

You can get Internet Explorer 8 at https://www.microsoft.com/ie8 in 26 languages.

In addition to offering improved security and privacy protections, Internet Explorer 8 is one of the fastest browsers on the market today, beating other top browsers in page load time on almost 50 percent of the 25 top comScore Inc. Web sites. It also helps people save time while using the Web with easy-to-use new features, including the following:

  • Accelerators. Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.
  • Web Slices. Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8 makes favorite information from sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web.
  • Visual search suggestions. The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time.

For me what's most interesting about Accelerators and Web Slices is that they downgrade to other browsers and previous versions of Internet Explorer without any more code. The features are very compatible. You can learn about how you can use these features in your Web site at Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit.

To implement a Web Slice, you add some known attributes to your HTML and IE8 does the rest. Web Slices is a new feature enabling websites to connect to your users who can subscribe to content directly within a webpage. Web Slices behave just like RSS feeds; users can subscribe to get updates and be notified of changes. For more information about the steps to build a Web Slice, see Web Slide Tutorial. 

Accelerators enable your users to find information without leaving the current webpage. To add an accelerator, you add an XML file that provides the interface of how the browser should communicate with the service through URL templates. Then you can add a button and a line of JavaScript to your page to advertise your Accelerator. For more information, see OpenService Accelerators Developer Guide. 

The other great feature inside of Internet Explorer is Developer Tools. This tool enables Web site developers to quickly debug Microsoft JScript, investigate a behavior specific to Internet Explorer, or iterate rapidly to prototype a new design or try solutions to a problem on-the-fly. You can use it to figure out how your cascading style sheet properties interact. For more information, see Discovering Internet Explorer Developer Tools.

For more information about the user proposition for Internet Explorer 8, see Internet Explorer 8 Face Sheet, Browser Security and Privacy Fact Sheet.

Also, the welcome address, keynotes, and Ask the Gu are all available now at Live.VisitMix.Com