Chris Wilson from IE talked about the new features.
- Beta1 is all about developer and web authors features, getting the platform ready. A later beta will have user experience improvements
- Predictable Experience for Users:
- Domain Name is Highlighted in Address bar
- Improved Manage Add-Ons Experience
- Improved ActiveX: Per User ActiveX Install without admin, Per-Site ActiveX Controls, DEP/NX code execution prevention
- Users Sites & Applications must continue to work with a new browser
- Improved User Productivity
- IE 8 is resilient after crashes – the frame continues to run, only the tabs gets reloaded
- Support unlocking the web with W3C ARIA
- Improved Zoom capability (Page layout is preserved)
- Everyone uses lots of web services and it is manual.For this, there are Activities now. It is implemented with OpenService. As a service provider, you can check for your service is installed, if not prompt for install. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample)
- Portions of a page is important, that’s where Web slices come. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample). It uses the Windows Feed infrastructure to keep it refreshed.
- Complete CSS 2.1 Compliance
- Generated Content and Counters
- New ‘display’ values for tables
- Outlines
- CSS 3 Box-Sizing Property
- CSS 3 Vertical Text
- Unbiased CSS Test suites
- All IE8 CSS/JS have a debugger in the box.
- Most of the performance problems were Network Perf is frequently the problem
- In Broadband the parallel connection limit increased to Six from two
- JScript improvements
- CSS Selector API
- HTML 5.0 Offline storage, offline/online events
Beta 1 is available from here | Complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.
Mix 2008 – Leveraging Local Storage in IE