Microsoft will release its Internet Explorer 8 browser for download on March 19. Microsoft said security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L (AJAX) support are key priorities for Internet Explorer 8.
Microsoft officials at the company’s MIX09 conference here, said IE 8 would become available for download from the Internet Explorer 8 web site at 9 a.m. pacific time on March 19. The timing of the release is to coincide with a keynote to be delivered by Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, who will formally announce the technology’s release to the web.
In an interview with eWEEK at the MIX09 event here, Mike Nash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows product management, told eWEEK that Microsoft also is announcing that there are more than 500 new add-ons for IE 8 in the way of accelerators, web slices and visual search.
“This means there is a tremendous number of opportunities for developers to differentiate a web site or to do various things with it,” Nash said
Accelerators are a form of selection-based search that enables a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse. According to Microsoft, Accelerators eliminate the need to copy and paste content between web pages. IE8 specifies an X M L-based encoding that enables a web application or web service to be invoked as an Accelerator service. Web Slices are snippets of an entire page that a user can subscribe to. Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the browser’s Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.
Microsoft said security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L (AJAX) support are key priorities for Internet Explorer 8.
IE 8 also features the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 (IEAK 8). Nash said IEAK “allows an enterprise to configure the browser to meet the company’s default settings.”
Sounds like they are trying to make the browser more user friendly. I switched to Firefox because of the features that IE lacked.
Matt,
This is going to be their best browser! It’s less resource hungry and improved security. It also will handle JavaScript far better than earlier releases.
I have heard nothing but praise for this so far, but a bit gun shy so I will wait a day or two. You using it yet?
Hey bro!
Long time since you enter these waters. IE8 is the best browser Microsoft has released by far. Give it a test drive!
I have been dealing with health issues again Frank,same ‘ol crap. I have tried it and it seems to be f a s t e r!
You are on my list lol…..
Fool,
Sorry to hear that and I know you have from our other conversations. I hope all is well and I am sending you my magical dust! :) Try IE8 it’s Microsoft’s best effort!