Microsoft has posted a VERY early look at new features for [url=http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/NewFeatures.htm]Internet Explorer 8[/url]. Most of the links on the page don’t work and it seems like this page went public a bit early. It’s not linked from the main Microsoft site so it may be a work in progress and may disappear at any time.
Here’s a quick look at the new features:
ActivitiesActivities make any webpage interactive. You can, for example, go to www.yourfavoritepizzajoint.com and right click. The menu will then allow a number of interactive options including mapping, related news, sending to your blog or email, etc. Strangely the screenshot shows a facebook option so there musty be some third party hook into the API for any number of others to add custom contextual functions to the activities menu.
What I’m really looking for is an OCS plugin that allows you to click on any phone number on a webpage to call the number. No clue yet if “Activities” allow this yet.
WebSlicesThese look like just another way of integrating the Vista sidebar (aka gadget bar) into IE. It’s nice, but I’m not sure it’s exactly new or world-changing. Regardless, coders can add webslices into their pages and allow users to save these gadgets into IE. They’ll be fed by feeds similiar to RSS and update regularly. The screenshot shows a weather feed. I see a sports scores webslice as another obvious option but I’m not sure this will ever evolve beyond a niche market. However, a youTube webslice could be fairly interesting and there are plenty of obvious uses in the adult industry. Favorites Bar
B-b-b-BORING. Minimal added functionality from IE7. And who has so few favorites they’d all fit on across the top of the menubar?
ACR – Automatic Crash Recovery
Finally something useful. Of course, in stead of fixing the problem MS instead chose to make the symptoms not as bad. ACR will attempt to recover your tabs and other work when IE hangs, freezes or just plain dies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had 6-7 tabs open and when IE7 crashes I have no idea what was open in the other tabs. This is a feature, really a pseudo bug fix, I’m really looking forward to. Maybe next rev they’ll just make it so IE won’t crash… one can dream.
Improved Phishing filter
The key feature here is the ability to more granularly set the phishing filter behavior via GPO. This should have been included in IE7 in my opinion.
The links to the Beta 1 install are available [url=http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm]here[/url]. Use at your own risk.
-Alex
Check out my recent posts:Deploying OCS clients en masse[/url][url=http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25624]Tools for use with OCS 2007 (part 1)[/url]
[url=http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25731]
