internet explorer 8

Windows Internet Explorer 8 (abbreviated IE8) is the latest web browser developed by Microsoft in the long running Internet Explorer browser series. The browser was released on March 19, 2009 for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7. Both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are available. It is the successor to Internet Explorer 7, released in 2006, and is the default browser for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems except in Europe. IE8's global market share is estimated to be about 18-20%.

According to Microsoft, security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and Ajax support were its priorities for Internet Explorer 8. 

 

Features

Added features

Suggested Sites

This feature is described by Microsoft as a tool to suggest websites, which is done by the browser sending information to Microsoft over a secure connection, which keeps the information and a per-session, uniquely-generated identifier for a short time. The Suggested Sites feature is turned off by default, and is disabled when the user is browsing with InPrivate enabled or visiting SSL-secured, intranet, IP address, or IDN address sites. Potentially personally-identifiable information such as the user's IP address and browser information is sent to Microsoft as an artifact of the HTTPS protocol. Microsoft has stated that they do not store this information.

The functionality was defended by Microsoft after itworld.com's Gregg Keizer described it as a "phone home" feature.

InPrivate

A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with IE8, and consists of two main features: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering. Like similar privacy protection modes in Safari, Firefox 3.5, and Google Chrome, InPrivate Browsing has been described as a "porn mode" in various news outlets. InformationWeek mentioned it as a "'Stealth' Privacy Mode".

InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent one's browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no easily accessible evidence of browsing or search history. InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third party websites can potentially use to track browsing activity. InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.

As with other private browsing modes there are ways that information about a browsing session can be recovered.

Accelerators

Accelerators are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse. Actions such as selecting the text or other objects will give users access to the usable Accelerator services (such as blogging with the selected text, or viewing a map of a selected geographical location), which can then be invoked with the selected object. According to Microsoft, Accelerators eliminate the need to copy and paste content between web pages. IE8 specifies an XML-based encoding which allows a web application or web service to be invoked as an Accelerator service. How the service will be invoked and for what categories of content it will show up is specified in the XML file. Similarities have been drawn between Accelerators and the controversial Smart tags, feature experimented with in the IE 6 Beta but withdrawn after criticism (though later included in MS Office).

Web Slices and authenticated feeds

Web Slices are snippets of the entire page to which a user can subscribe. Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals. Developers can mark parts of the pages as Web Slices, using the hAtom and hSlice microformat. Web Slices have been compared to Active Desktop, introduced in Internet Explorer 4 in 1997.

Microsoft donated the specification to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. It is also covered by the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Windows RSS Platform also supports authenticated feeds beginning with Internet Explorer 8.

Autocomplete changes

The address bar features domain highlighting for added security so that the top-level domain is shown in black whereas the other parts of the URL are grayed out. Domain highlighting cannot be turned off by users or web sites. Other features of the address bar include support for pasting multi-line URLs and an improved model for inserting the selection caret, and selecting words, or entire URLs in the Address bar. The inline autocomplete feature has been dropped from Internet Explorer 8, leading to criticism by beta users.^[42]

SmartScreen Filter

SmartScreen Filter extended Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter to include protection from socially engineered malware. If a user visits a site which has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, then Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited. From there, the user can either visit his or her homepage, visit the previous site, or continue to the unsafe page. New with SmartScreen in IE8: if a user attempts to download a file from a location reported harmful then the download is cancelled. The effectivness Smartscreen filtering compares favorably to socially engineered malware protection measures in other browsers

This feature can be disabled using Group Policy

Developer tools

For developers, IE8 includes tools that allow HTML, CSS and JavaScript debugging directly from the browser.

 

Favorites Bar

Another new feature in IE8 is a redesigned Favorites Bar, which can now host content such as Web Slices, web feeds as well as documents, in addition to website links. Automatic Tab crash recovery

If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience. If one or more of your tabs unexpectedly closes or crashes, your tabs are automatically reloaded and you are returned to the site you were on before the crash.

Zooming

Full-page zoom now reflows the text to remove the appearance of horizontal scrollbars on zooming.

Performance and stability

Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript runtime and the associated garbage collector. Circular memory leaks, which resulted earlier due to inconsistent handling of JScript objects and DOM objects, have been alleviated. For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes. LCIE prevents glitches and hangs from bringing down the entire browser and leads to higher performance and scalability. Permissions for ActiveX controls have been made more flexible - instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.

Multilingual User Interface (MUI)

Per-Site ActiveX Controls

The Information bar lets users allow an ActiveX control to run on all Web sites or only the current one (Per-Site basis). Users can easily make changes to this behavior through the Manage Add-ons dialog box. For each ActiveX control there's a list of sites where it has been approved by the user.

Removed features

  No longer able to drag and drop web page text to other applications.

  Web page links and images can be dragged only to the desktop or to an open Explorer window.

  Inline AutoComplete

  The option to delete files and settings stored by addons or ActiveX controls; rather, it is performed automatically.

  CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode

  Support for the proprietary element is dropped

  Opening web folders (must now be done through the drive mapping tools).

 

Standards support

Standards mode

Internet Explorer 8's main rendering mode, known as standards mode, has improved support for various web standards, especially CSS, compared to Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions.

The web standards supported by IE8 include the following:

• HTML, including the HTML object fallback and the abbr and elements
• Data: URIs
• CSS level 1 is fully supported. CSS level 2 is mostly supported however the CSS level 2 implementation does diverge from the CSS2 specification on over 50 counts. CSS level 3 is partially supported.
• DOM storage
• Partial HTML 5 support, including cross-document messaging
• Selectors APIs
• DOM, that brings it in line with implementations in other browsers. Attributes and properties in DOM objects are now handled differently, and the behavior of the getAttribute, setAttribute and removeAttribute modifiers have been changed to match the behavior of other browsers
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification for enhanced accessibility in Ajax-based rich Internet applications.

However, IE8 does not support some other W3C standards:

• XHTML (except when used as a form of HTML)
• MathML
• SVG. The fact that IE8 does not support SVG was criticized by Tim Berners-Lee.
• Significant parts of DOM Level 2 and 3, including the standard event model used by other browsers.

IE8 passes the Acid2 test, but fails the Acid3 test with a score of 20/100. During its development, Microsoft developed over 7,000 tests for CSS level 2 compliance, which were submitted to the W3C for inclusion in their test suite.

Compatibility mode

Internet Explorer 8 was promoted by Microsoft as having stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. This would have been a repetition of the situation with IE7, which (while having fixed a lot of bugs from IE6) broke pages that used the IE6 bugs to work around its non-compliance. This was especially a problem for offline HTML documents, which may not be updatable (e.g. stored on a read-only medium, such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM).

To avoid this situation, IE8 implements a form of Version Targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers.

A browser with a newer version than what the page has been coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior holds true.

Microsoft proposed that a page with a doctype that triggers standards mode (or almost standards mode) in IE7 would, by default, trigger IE7-like behavior, called "standards mode" (now called "strict mode") in IE8 and future versions of IE. The new features of IE8 is enabled to trigger what Microsoft called the "IE8 standards mode" (now called "standards mode"). Doctypes that trigger quirks mode in IE7 will continue to do so in IE8.

Peter Bright of Ars Technica claimed that the idea of using a meta tag to pick a specific rendering mode fundamentally misses the point of standards-based development, but positioned the issue as one of idealism versus pragmatism in web development, noting that not all of the Web is actively maintained, and that, "demanding that web developers update sites to ensure they continue to work properly in any future browser version is probably too much to ask."

The result for IE 8 Beta 1 was that it could render three modes: "Quirks," "Strict," and "Standard." When there is an old DOCTYPE or when there is no DOCTYPE, IE renders it like IE5 would (quirks mode). When a special meta element or its corresponding HTTP header is included in a web page, IE8 will render that page like IE7 would (strict mode). Otherwise, IE8 renders pages with its own engine (standard mode). Users can switch between the three modes with a few clicks. The release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 revealed that many web sites do not work in this new standards mode.

Microsoft maintains a list of websites that have been reported to be problematic with IE8's standards mode, known as the compatibility view list. When a user enables this list, IE8 will render the websites in the list using its compatibility view mode. The list is occasionally updated to add newly reported problematic websites, as well as to remove websites whose owners have requested removal. The Internet Explorer team also tests the websites on the list for compatibility issues and removes those where none are found.

Source : www.wikipedia.com