Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 First Look

Hold on to your websites, folks - Microsoft's changing the game on the Web.

Just this past week, Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 to public testing. While this may seem like a small undertaking in the compatibility department (based on the Vole's past compliance with best practices concerning Web content), be prepared for a shock: This time, the "house of Gates," as I shall call it, has finally decided to stick up for itself and set a long-overdue compatibility effectiveness goaln that the first beta actually seems to meet for once.

I'll have more on that in a few, however. Suffice to say that IE8,l as it currently stands, is due to shake up the Web, even at this early stage. But first, let's talk features. First up is the new Web Slices feature. This you'll either love or hate, depending on how well people support it dlown the road. Remember the Active Desktop idea from 1997? Well, if you don't, I wouldn't blame you. Designed for nearly the same thing as the Web Slices, the idea was just too early and way out of the boundaries lof the time. The main culprit, of course, was the average ISP bandwidth in the 90's - with so many people still on AOL and other dial-up providers, the idea was so ahead of it's time that you can probably guess what happened. Now, though, it seems that Web Slices are there to revive the idea in a totally new way so it remains to be seen if it will really take off for once in my life.

If it does, then what we can look forward to is much the same thing: custom, on demand browser widgets (much like the Windows Vista sidebar's gadgets) where you can track anything from the weather to eBay items from the browser's favorites bar. Yes, that's right - the Links feature of IE8 is now called the favorites bar. As before, your quick links appear right here, but is also where the favorites center (reworked since it's premiere in IE7) and favorite places management have moved, leaving more space on the toolbar for your browser tabs and action commands. Unfortunately, the address bar and navigation tools remain above the menu bar and other toolbars to maintain the interface set forth in IE7 and Windows Vista, so purists will continue to find themselves up against the Vole's brickhtml wall in that regard.

Another thing that will likely confuse IE purists is the radical change in expected HTML standards. Yes, you heard that right - HTML standards. Starting with IE8 beta 1, the expectations for HTML code have changed by default to be similar to that of the upcoming Firefox 3, a rather draconian kind of expectation in its own right. That is to say, the way it worked in IE7 and earlier is history - no more coding to a separate set of rules for Internet Explorer users. With IE8, Volish supporters are no longer second class Web users - how it works in Firefox is similar to how it works in IE8 for the first time ever, so now it's Acid2 compliance for the win all around! (That being said, the next step is of course the newly-released Acid3 test, and as of beta 1, IE8 has a lot of cathing up to do to meet THAT benchmark compared to Firefox 3.)

Rounding out this preview is the new activities feature. Designed to assist with a variety of online tasks, activities are a component of IE8 that are designed to enhance your online productivity. Activities currently supported in beta 1 include translation (which I successfully used to translate sample word "third" to the German "drittens"), dictionary referencing (with definitions provided by Microsoft's internet-based version of Encarta), and mapping, blogging and web search functions (using Live maps, Live spaces and your default search engine, respectively).

These are but a few of the new features of IE8 as of beta 1, so it remains to be seen what the final build offers in addition to these, if anything. Rest assured, however, that IE8 is a drastic step up from IE7 and previous versions thereof, so be prepared for quite a few surprises when the final version hits in the near future.

FINAL VERDICT
Beta Version, No Review Score
Free Download
Microsoft Corp.
http://www.microsoft.com/