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Hi, my name is Paul Cutsinger and I’m the Lead Program Manager for the IE8 User Experience.
As Dean mentioned in hisbeta 2 announcementpost, for IE8 we focused on improving people’s everyday browsing experience – what they do all the time. We looked closely at what people do and how they do it to design ways to make their browsing even better. For all of the top usage patterns, we looked for ways to reduce steps, introduce new capabilities, and improve on how people actually browse.
In this post, I’ll discuss a small sampling of IE8’s new features that make everyday browsing faster and easier. Future posts will cover each of these, and other, features in more depth.
Smart Address Bar
Based on our observations of IE7 and IE8 Beta 1 usage, we learned that roughly 80% of the time people’s destination on the web is a previously visited site. In the past, people would use their Favorites or History, or they’d just go through all the steps to navigate to the website again.
The Smart Address Bar enables you to find Favorites and sites in your history by just typing a few letters. That’s much fewer steps than using the Favorites and History center. We also added the capability to search the title, web address and even folders for those who have organized their favorites. This means that you’ll find sites even if type something other than just the first part of the web address. To make it easier to find what you’re looking for, we group the results and highlight the matched text.
Favorites Bar
One click access is ideal for the sites and information you want frequently and you can use the Favorites Bar to do this. You can now add favorites, feeds,Web Slicesand folders to the Favorites Bar for one click access. It’s also one click to add a favorite to the Favorites Bar.
Many people make a habit of checking back on certain sites like email, auctions, news and blogs many times a day. Well, it’s great that these can be just one click from the Favorites Bar but, it’s really only interesting to see these pages when they’ve changed. So, feeds and Web Slices will turn bold, like an unread email, when there’s something new to see. Now you’ll know that there will be something interesting even before you click.
New Tab Page
When people open a new tab, they’re about to go to a website. So, we looked for ways to make that as fast and easy as possible. They could use the address bar or the Favorites Bar. They could also use the Search Box with itsVisual Search suggestionsnew to Beta 2. Those are all great ways to go to a website. While studying usage patterns, we found a few other opportunities to refine the experience even more. Now, from the new tab page, you can immediately start common navigation tasks like reopening a closed tab or starting anInPrivateBrowsing session.
All of these come together to help you get to the websites you want with the fewest possible steps and without needing to hunt through the menus to figure out how.
We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it athttp://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!
You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.
While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.
We focused our work around three themes:everyday browsing(the things that real people do all the time),safety(the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and theplatform(the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
Everyday Browsing
We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we’ll take a more holistic approach. That’s how we built the product and how we’d like to talk about it.
From our customer research, we saw that the bulk of user activity outside of web pages involved tabs and“navigation” – the act of getting to the site the user wants to get to. We also knew that adding features has an impact only if they’re “in the flow” of how people actually use the product. Another menu item might matter in a checklist on a blog somewhere, but won’t matter to real people browsing. That’s why IE8’s New Tab experience is so remarkable: it’s obvious –afteryou see it:
IE8 makes bringing back tabs (and entire IE sessions) users have closed a lot easier; it’s in the natural flow of how users work. IE8 also takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which. Below, the tabs that came from the links in the search results page are grouped together and colored differently from the headlines the user followed off another page, which are different from links the user followed off other pages:
Navigation– or getting to where you want to – is a lot faster and easier too. Typing in the Smart Address Bar not only searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds, but provides a great experience:
We put a lot of different designs in front of users in order to find one that was this effective. It’s easy to scan, with the different sections marked off and one line for each item, and the highlighting is easy on the eye. Deleting typos (or other unwanted suggestions) from this list is also easy – notice the red "x" above appears when a user places his mouse over an item.
Beyond tabs and navigation, people use services all the time. When you have an address but want a map, or want to just select some text and make a blog post out of it,IE8’s Accelerators(formerly known as‘
At the start of the Internet Explorer 8 project we made a commitment to great website compatibility. It’s worth noting that this commitment hasn’t changed, even given the short-term impact of ourannouncementto better align with Microsoft’s interoperability principles. In other words, compatibility has been and continues to be a very important part of the Internet Explorer 8 feature set. With Beta 2 we’re announcing a brand new feature known as Compatibility View. In a nutshell, Compatibility View allows content designed for older web browsers to still work well in Internet Explorer 8. Compatibility View and End Users When a web site says that it supports modern web standards, Internet Explorer 8 respects that and displays the site using its most standards compliant mechanism. In the majority of cases, this works out just fine. However, every once in a while, a page that says“display me using modern standards” really means “display me like Internet Explorer 7 used to display modern standards pages”. This is where Compatibility View comes in. There are a bunch of changes under the hood, but the main points to know are– A new UI button located in the navigation bar just to the right of the address bar (next to the refresh button) controls the Compatibility View feature and replaces theEmulate IE7 buttonfrom Beta 1. IE only displays this button when toggling into Compatibility View makes sense, such as when viewing Standards mode pages. In all other cases, such as when viewing Quirks mode pages or viewing intranet sites (they’re already being displayed in Compatibility View as discussed later in this post), IE hides the button. Depending on the speed of your machine, you may see the page refresh when the Compatibility View button is selected. In any case, a balloon tip lets you know that the site is now running in Compatibility View. Additionally, the Compatibility View icon shows a“pressed” state so that you can know what view you’re running in after the balloon tip disappears. The "scope" of emulation is limited to the domain you are viewing when you press the button, not some other mechanism like the life of the process or the tab. And, Internet Explorer remembers your preference by storing the domain in a client-side list so that the next time you visit the site you don't have to press the button again. Compatibility View and the Enterprise A large number of line-of-business websites are Internet Explorer 7 capable today. In order to preserve compatibility, Internet Explorer 8 ships with smart defaults based on zone evaluation. In the default state, all sites on the public internet display in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode (Compatibility View off) and all intranet websites display in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode (Compatibility View on). Let’s look at some examples. If you navigate to sites on the Internet like
I am here to tell you how to upgrade to IE8 Beta 2. IE8 Beta 2system requirementsare the same as IE8 Beta 1 and it’s currently available in English, Chinese Simplified, German and Japanese. Stay tuned for more localized IE8 Beta 2 versions to be available shortly. Before you start IE8 Beta 2 installation, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: If you have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 installed, the IE8 installer will automatically uninstall any earlier versions and then install the latest version of IE8 Beta2 for you. You will be prompted to reboot twice. The first reboot is to remove IE8 Beta 1 from your machine and the second one to complete the IE8 Beta 2 installation. When you launch Internet Explorer, you can open the Help->About Internet Explorer dialog to see the version number 8.0.6001.18241. There is 1 update required when running IE8 Beta 2 on multi-core XPSP2 x86 computers: Knowledge Base Article 932823orKnowledge Base Article 946501- This update resolves a problem in which an access violation occurs when an application exists on a Windows XP SP2-based multi-core computer. It will be installed automatically if you select“Install the latest updates” option in Setup Wizard. The only time we encourage you to manually uninstall Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 prior to upgrading to IE8 Beta 2 for Windows XP users is if you happened to install Windows XP SP3 after installing IE8 Beta 1. To see if you need to manually uninstall IE8 Beta 1, check these things: Click on theStartMenu and then right click onMy Computerand then clickProperties On the General Tab under System it’ll say Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 From theStartmenu, openControl Paneland clickAdd or Remove Programs Select Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and you are unable to click on the Remove button. If you answered yes to both questions, you will be able to install Internet Explorer 8 Beta2, but once installed, you will not be able to uninstall either IE8 or Windows XP SP3 later. The Setup Wizard will warn you prior to installation: If you chose to continue, Windows XP SP3 and IE8 Beta2 will become permanent. You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won’t be able to uninstall them. To avoid getting into this situation, we strongly encourage you to follow these steps before installing Internet Explorer Beta 2: See my earlier blog post onInternet Explorer and Windows XP SP3for more information. Internet Explorer Beta 2 will be offered to those Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 As others have written here before, users should be in control of their information. That’s at the core of privacy. Privacy has two aspects: disclosure and choice. Disclosure means informing users in plain language about the data collected about them and how it’s used. Choice means putting users in control of their data and giving them tools to protect it. Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing“off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at whichwebsite you bank. What if you want to delete your browsing history after the fact, but you don’t want to lose your preferences at websites that you use frequently? When we began planning IE8, we took a hard look at our customers’ concerns about privacy on the web. As evidenced by some of thecomments on this blogduring the IE7 days, many users are concerned about so-called“over-the-shoulder privacy”, or the ability to control what their spouses, friends, kids, and co-workers might see. What about your privacy as you browse the web? As Dean outlined is his post earlier today, there is so-called“3rd-party” content on websites, some of which can gather data about how you browse the web. How do you know what that is, or how to control it? With respect to privacy, IE8 gives users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange. In the first part of this post I’ll describe two Internet Explorer 8 features that help you control your history, cookies, and other information that Internet Explorer stores on your behalf. In the latter part, I’ll describe two more features that can help you control how your browsing history is shared by websites. By default, IE8 browses the web the same way IE7 does. If you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend, or a public PC, sometimes you don’t want other people to know where you’ve been on the web. Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing makes that “over the shoulder” privacy easy by not storing history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data. Using InPrivate Browsing is as easy as launching a new InPrivate Browsing window. When you’re done, just close the window and IE will take care of the rest. While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place: Previous posts have coveredtrustworthy principlesin general and someproductspecificsas well. Privacy is an important part of trustworthy computing. This post discusses one aspect of privacy on the web: third-party content. When most people browse the web, they think what they see in the address bar and the site they are visiting are the same thing. However, web sites today typically incorporate content from many different web sites. For the sake of clear terminology, the site the user browses to directly (seen in the address bar) is the first-party site; the other sites that the first-party site incorporates in its site experience (but that the user hasn’t navigated to directly) are third-party sites. When you browse to a first-party site, you know that it can collect information about how you use the site. What many users don’t realize is that technically, third-party sites can collect information about users as well. Users aren’t typically well-informed about which third-party sites are collecting what information, how the sites use this information today, or how the sites could use the information in the future. Identifying Third-party Sites Most websites today are actually mosaics, or mash-ups, of several different sites. To see this, you can bring up the Privacy Report in Internet Explorer (from IE7’s Page menu or IE6’s View menu, choose the Web Page Privacy Policy menu item) for any site you visit. Here’s part of the report for a news site, and another from a credit card site: While the address bar shows the address of the current, first-party, site, this dialog shows the addresses ofallthe different web sites (including third-party sites) that the current web page includes content from. The browser visits every one of these sites in order to show the current web page’s content. The way that sites can pull content in from other sites is useful and powerful and typical on the web today. It’s part of the underlying design and structure of the web, and enables functionality (like an interactive map in the middle of a restaurant’s website, or a “share this” link in the middle a news article) that people value. Third-Party Sites and Privacy At the same time, bringing information together from different websites has privacy implications. A good example of this issue that most people have experienced involves email. Many email systems treat email messages that come from unknown senders in a special way,blocking imagesin them and displaying a warning like this one: The message body typically has some missing images (“red X’s”) with text nearby, like “Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.” Why do email systems block these external As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. - As part of our plan to reach full CSS 2.1 compliance with Internet Explorer 8, we have decided to place all properties that fulfill one of the following conditions behind the This change applies to the following properties, and therefore they should all be prefixed with We’ve been sharing plenty about the work we’ve done in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for browser users; we also want to share some of the notable advances we’ve made in the web developer platform in Beta 2. This post serves as an overview of the web platform changes since beta 1 that will be covered in more detail in the coming days and weeks. The Layout Engine First and foremost, we’ve been hard at work improving our standards support – we are now “CSS2.1 property complete,” meaning we’ve implemented every property in CSS 2.1 and are closing in on our goal of complete support for theCSS 2.1 specificationby the time we release. This work includes improved support for many existing CSS 2.1 scenarios such as selectors, visual formatting (display, positioning and sizing) and text; significant progress on the features first introduced in Beta 1 such as generated content, counters and outline; and some new and improved features such as theCSS3writing-mode property (currently behind–ms prefix.) In addition to the standards compliance work we have done, we have contributedmore testsfor the CSS 2.1 Test Suite including tests in support of the Accessibility Rich Internet Applications (WAI– ARIA) draft standard. The Programmability Engine We’ve also been improving our programmability engine. In addition to working onperformance gainsacross the entire programmability stack, including in the core JavaScript engine, we’ve implemented mutability in our Document Object Model prototypes as well as attribute getters and setters in order to enable web developers and framework builders to extend our object model. We’ve continued our Beta 1 investments in cross-domain requests (XDR) by working together with the Web Applications Working Group on improving the Access Control specification, and supporting it from XDR. This makes building interoperable cross-domain requests easier for everyone! Additionally, we updated our DOM Storage implementation to better align with the recent rounds of changes to theHTML 5.0spec, especially in the localstorage method. Last, but not least, we’ve added toSafeHTML/toJSON/fromJSON which is a set of code that sanitizes HTML and JSON content sent through the wire. It’s a great partner to the XDR (cross domain request) feature as well as HTML 5.0’s XDM (Cross Document Messaging) and delivers safer mashups to the user! While Beta 1 introduced the tools and provided helpful features like live HTML editing and a JScript debugger, Beta 2 is significantly more powerful with live editing of CSS, save to file, and console.log support. And because you need to make sure your site is not just correct, but fast, Beta 2 also includes a JScript profiler to help you find hotspots and compare design patterns. We’d love feedback on the tool and suggestions on ways to make it even more helpful. In Closing… With all the posts about the great things for the people who use the web with Beta 2, we wanted to remind those of you who build the web Hello everyone! One of the features we improved in IE8 is the‘new tab’ page, which is the page you see by default when you click the New Tab button on the Tab row, or if you hit CTRL+T (the keyboard shortcut that does the same thing). We’re the Program Managers for this page and would like to walk you through the history and evolution of this feature towhat it is today in IE8 Beta 2. When IE7 was released in 2006, many users did not know what tabs were, so our new tab page didn’t really do anything except say “I’m a tab” and offer a link to help content for folks who were interested in learning more. Now it’s 2008, and web users are even more sophisticated and tab-enabled browsers are ubiquitous, so we decided that it was time to start making the new tab page more useful than just saying “I’m here.” So what kinds of tasks do we add to the new tab page? We started with our first goal for this page:provide easy access to tab-related tasks.We recognize that when you open a new tab, you’re probably on your way to go do something else in the browser like visit a new site or start a new search. So, it seemed logical to make this new tab page offer up tab-related tasks to the user, especially given our desire to makenavigation easier in IE8. However, as we looked at all the tasks and links that we might put on the page, it became clear that not all tasks were suitable. For instance, we could have added a search box to the new tab page, since we know a large number of users issue Internet searches with some frequency. However, IE’s search box is already visible and available to the user, as are any search toolbars the user may have installed, so adding yet another redundant search entry point was uninteresting. We considered adding links to commonly-visited sites (or maybe your very favorite Favorites), but again, that seemed duplicative – that list was already a click away with the newSmart Address bar autocomplete dropdown. So here is our second goal for this page:be a discoverability aid to cool features that might otherwise be hidden,and its corollary,don’t bother with features that are already visible to the user.We know this page would be a good advertising surface for features that users might not otherwise discover. The ability to restore a closed tab from a window was new to IE8, but many users might not even know that the feature existed (our customer feedback data indicates that most users don’t right-click tabs to see what menu options are available to them). With our two goals in mind, we created a page that showed what this might look like. Here’s an early, early version for comparison in case you’re curious: This was essentially IE7’s new tab page rearranged, with some new IE8 functionality thrown in. It had a few tab-related tasks (re-opening closed tabs& windows), and a new feature now known as InPrivate browsing. First, we’d heard feedback that even in IE7, this page looked a lot like an error page, down to using the same color scheme and fonts. Some users might see this page and assume that something was wrong. So, we knew we needed to differentiate the page from the product’s error pages. Second, we thought it was visually distracting. While many users w As you may have guessed from the title of this post, Internet Explorer 8, as of Beta 2, offers native JSON parsing and serialization. This new native JSON functionality enables Internet Explorer 8 aware AJAX applications to run both faster and safer! What’s JSON? For those of you that are not die hard AJAX developers, allow me to provide a bit of background.JSONis a simple human readable data interchange format often used by AJAX applications when transmitting data between the server and the web application. For example, imagine that you select a contact name from your favorite web mail client so that you can see the contact information. The server might send down a stream of data to the web application (which is running in the browser) that looks like this: { "phoneNumbers":[ Fortunately, this format is syntactically compatible with Javascript. Many applications today will use the Javascripteval()function to convert the data payload into a Javascript object. Usingeval()is a dangerous and expensive approach.eval()parses the string as a general Jscript expression and executes it. If the string being passed toeval()has been tampered with, it could contain unexpected data or even someone else’s code – which is now injected into your web application. There are libraries, written in Javascript, that are designed to more safely parse untrusted JSON payloads. Some libraries do a strict verification of the data payload using a parser written in Jscript (http://www.json.org/json_parser.js). Some libraries, likejson2.js, do a sanity check on the input string using a regular expression then use th For Beta 1, we discussed some of thetechnical improvements(like domain highlighting, multi-line paste, and improved click behavior) we made to IE8’s address bar. For Beta 2, we took the covers off of even bigger changes which fit in with our goal of makingnavigation easier and fasterwith IE8. Starting with Beta 2, when you type in the Address Bar, IE8 returns results not just based on the URL of the sites you’ve visited, but the title and other properties as well. It has an updated look that shows you both the title and address (URL) of each match and we also highlight the matches so they’re easy to see. Here’s a screenshot: The new dropdown is easy toscanvisually, displays the results by group (more on that below), sorts based on our relevancy algorithm (more on that later too), and subtly highlights matches based on what you’ve typed. The difference between this and IE7 is quite noticeable. For instance, I, Christopher, watch and play a lot of soccer (orfutbolif you prefer), and IE7 unfortunately didn’t help me get to my soccer sites very easily. Only sites that begin with the word ‘soccer’ in their domain appear (with one possibleexception), and without titles, it’s hard to tell which page is which: With IE8, not only do I get more results, but it’s easier to see what’s what. I can tell much more about the sites I’m viewing with an at-a-glance compared to IE7 (I expanded the History section in this screenshot): As Paulpointed out, this means you’ll spend less time looking for the sites you’re interested in, and more time using them, and do so with fewer steps. Find What You’re Looking For More Easily With IE8 The IE8 Smart Address bar Autocomplete also supports multiple word searches. Results will match all the words you type, so the more you type, the more refined your results will be. You can search across a site’s page title or address, and for RSS Feeds and Favorites, you can also search for them by local name and folder name as well. For Feed Items, you can also search by Item Title. IE does a prefix word breaking by default, meaning “Be” will match “Beijing” but “jing” would not (prefix means we search starting at the beginning of every word). The word breaking engine splits words at common delimiters like spaces, hyphens, and slashes. Folders: The Tags You’re Already Using Most people organize their Favorites into folders, so think of your Favorites and Feeds folder hierarchy as your tagging system. Type a subfolder name from your Favorites or RSS folder, and all the Favorites or Feeds under that node will be among the set of results returned to you to choose from. In this case, we searched for‘restaurants’ and all the Favorites under the Restaurants folder were returned as possible results, even those that didn’t have that word in their title, local name, or URL: One of the key themes for IE8 is developer productivity.IE8 Beta 1improved developer productivity through an optimized core scripting engine and script debugger. In this release, we continued to invest in the areas that bring more power and productivity to the web developer community. Here is a quick summary of the work that we’ve done for IE8 Beta 2: Scripting Engine Many enhancements have been done to the scripting engine. One feature that will bring a lot of value to the AJAX developers is the introduction of native JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). With JSON becoming the de-facto data interchange language for contemporary web applications; we have included native JSON support within the JScript engine. With this, developers can use a native JSON object to serialize and de-serialize JScript objects. This feature makes Internet Explorer 8 the first browser to support JSON natively! Script Debugger You have experienced the script debugger in IE8 beta 1. We’ve made it even better in IE8 beta 2. You can view script in syntax colored code similar to what you might expect in code editors such as Visual Studio™. The console shows all the script errors in a webpage at a central location. We also support the console.log mechanism to log the errors effectively. The Console is extensible for you to add your own commands through custom scripts. Script Profiler This is one of the new features of theIE8 Developer Tools. It will help you identify and fix performance bottlenecks in scripts so that they can run better and faster. The Script Profiler comes with an easy-to-use UI and powerful features such as‘Call Tree View’ and ‘Export’ functionality. The Profiler output can be exported to tools like Excel so you can visualize the execution times through charts and graphs. Does this sound interesting? Check out theJScript PM Channel 9 videoto learn more. Stay tuned for more in depth details on these features in future posts. Shreesh Dubey edit: title adjustment Hello, My name is Sébastien Zimmermann. I’m the developer owner for theVisual Search Feature, which Sharon already described in detail. I also own theAccelerators Button Feature, and during IE7 worked on Setup and Phishing Filter—now “SmartScreen® Filter”. In this post, I would like to get you started on creating your own Visual Search service/provider for Internet Explorer 8. If you own or develop websites of any kind—even if it’s a small website or an intranet site—this post is for you. Making your website available for search from within the browser enables your customers/users to access your website whenever they need a service from it, without having them type your full web address. Additionally, you (and your brand) are always there with them, right in their browser. The more useful the service, the more likely users are to install it to have an ongoing connection with your website. To keep things simple, I will take the“Hello, World!” approach: give you the basics so you can quickly get your service running. To keep things simple, this service won’t even be dynamic at first. Once the foundations are there, it will be easy for you to tailor the sample to your own needs, no matter what language your pages arewritten in. For the sake of simplicity, I assume in this post that your website is at Before users can install your service, you’ll first need to define it in a way the browser can understand, i.e. through theOpenSearch DescriptionXML file. Copy the following code and paste it into a file that you’ll put at the root of your website. We’ll name it There are three important pieces we define in this file: In August 2008,Dean announced the release of IE8 Beta 2in English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Today the IE team is pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer Beta 2 in 21 additional languages. The languages released today are fully localized versions of the IE8 English Beta 2. The Complete List of IE8 Beta 2 Languages Note:Please visit theInternet Explorer 8 homepageon Microsoft.com to download IE8 Beta 2 in your language of choice. Alternatively, you can download all languages from the MicrosoftDownloadCenter. Supported Platforms This release is supportedonly on x86 versions of the following platformswith the exception of Hebrew which is also supported on 64-Bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. When installing localized versions of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on XP or Windows Server 2003 please remember that the base language of the operating system must match the IE8 language you are trying to install; otherwise the Setup Wizard will display an error. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the base language of Windows does not need to match the Internet Explorer 8 language version in order for a successful install. When your user active language matches the Internet Explorer 8 language you installed, then IE8 will appear in the desired language. You will still be able to use IE8 in all other scenarios, but it will appear in English as a fall back version. For further details on install guidelines, please see the How to Install localized versions of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 section in the IE8 Beta 2release notesand theUpgrading to Internet Explorer Beta Hello World! I’m Sharon Cohen, Program Manager for Search in Internet Explorer 8. If you’re already using IE8 Beta 2, you’ve probably already seen the new search features available in IE8, perhaps you’ve even tried them out. Today I’d like to show you these features in greater detail and fill you in on some of the things we were thinking about when we created them. Our goal for IE8 is to make searching for what you need faster and easier. We want you to search for the right term on the right provider and get the right information as quickly as possible. Here’s how we make that happen in IE8: Search and Visual Search Suggestions Search Suggestions allow your installed search providers to suggest different queries to you while you are typing. This is great when you aren’t sure of how to spell someone’s name or you can’t quite remember if the movie was called “The Birdcage” or “The Bird’s Nest”. You might already be familiar with textual search suggestions as they are already in use on some popular websites and in some toolbars. (IE8 supportsJSON suggestionswhich some of these use.) In IE8, we expanded the notion of a suggestion. In addition to providing text suggestions, search providers can now deliver visual suggestions, suggestions which include an image. The picture below shows text suggestions fromLive Searchand visual suggestions fromAmazon. Check out howAmazoncustomized the title of their suggestions section allowing them to indicate how many product matches are available for a given search term. You’ll also notice below how search providers can add additional separators to their suggestions. BotheBayand TheNew York Timeshave included separators which distinguish query sugge In anearlier post, we introduced the new IE8 Smart Address Bar dropdown functionality. Now we thought we’d spend some time discussing some of its less obvious features in more detail. More about the IE8 Smart Address Bar Autocomplete Suggestion With Windows Search installed, IE8 makes an attempt to determine what site you’re trying to get to. The site that it determines is most likely the one you’re looking for is called the “Autcomplete Suggestion.” This entry is given the SHIFT+ENTER shortcut, so it’s very easy to go to your most recommended site. But how do we determine what’s most relevant? We use a variety of factors to determine what site you’re trying to get to. IE8 takes into consideration what you’re typing in the Address Bar and weighs the results based on how well what you’ve typed matches against a variety of fields. For example: an exact match against the domain is ‘worth more’ than a match against a fragment down in the querystring part of the URL. We’re not going to give the exact rules for our algorithm (to avoid people gaming the system), but basically, some parts of the URL are more important than others. All matches are returned as part of the potential set of results, but “how good” a match helps determine the order. Once IE has narrowed down the set of hits based on what you’ve typed, it uses a bit more data to determine what you’re looking for, including how often you go to a particular site, and whether or not you’ve selected it from the list before. All of these are part of the relevancy model. But what’s most important to any user? Their History, a Favorite, or a Feed? Since your History tends to be a super-set of all your other data (every Favorite you visit, or Feed you read also ends up in History), IE8 gives precedence to the top History item. If no matches are available in your History, the Autocomplete Suggestion will return your top Favorite. If no Favorite matches, it will return your top Feed. This feature was designed as the replacement for Inline Autocomplete, which was removed in IE8 Beta 1. Inline Autocomplete had no smarts: it just completed what you were typing with the first complete match from your history, sorted alphabetically.In IE8 Autocomplete Suggestion is essentially the same thing (only now you use SHIFT+ENTER instead of just ENTER), and because of relevancy, we’ve found that it’s the address users are looking for over 2/3 of the time. Search from the IE8 Smart Address Bar For those of you who may or may not have noticed, whether you type in the Address Bar or Search Box, the dropdown underneath is the same control. Although it looks a little different depending on where it is, it’s all the same code running. One difference in how the dropdown acts is that, for example, under the Address Bar, it shows the keyboard tips section at the bottom, but under the Search Box, it shows the QuickPick menu. But did you know that you can flip the dropdown into Search Box mode, even when typing from the Address Bar? Just type a question mark followed by any word, string, or phrase, and it will act just like you opened the Search Box, with one exception: the keyboard shortcut section is visible and the QuickPick menu is not. Otherwise it’s the same – you get search suggestions (if available) from your default search provider and IE8 only shows you matches from your typed addresses and History. If you don’t rely on the QuickPick menu, it’s a great way to quickly do a search. Here’s a screenshot of Visual Search results coming back from an Amazon search for ‘xbox 360:’ If you typed multiple words in IE7, it Hello! I am Sameer Chabungbam, one of the Program Managers on the JScript Team. The recently releasedBeta 2 of Internet Explorer 8contains a lot of improvements which are aimed at making developing web applications on Internet Explorer 8 easier and more productive. One of these improvements is the JScript Profiler in Developer Tools, which provides critical JScript related performance data to a web developer that helps identify and fix performance related issues. We believe the Profiler is going to be a very helpful tool to fine tune the performance of the scripts in a web application. It is lightweight, easy-to-use and provides the following features: This post gives an overview of the Profiler and highlights some of its features. We hope you will try it out and give us your feedback. Launch the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 either by pressing F12 or selecting‘Developer Tools’ from the Tools dropdown on the command bar. Switch to the Profiler Tab, and you can see the new Script Profiler. Click the ‘Start Profiling’ button to begin a new profiling session. Now, you can perform the scenario you want to profile, and JScript performance data will be collected by the profiler automatically in the background. Note that the text of the button changes to‘Stop Profiling’ to indicate profiling is going on. To stop profiling, click the ‘Stop Profiling’ button. The profiler will process the collected performance data and display a profile report for the session just concluded. The report presents the data in two views which can be selected from the Current View dropdown: In both views, each row corresponds to a JScript function, with the various performance data in different columns. The view can be customized to show different columns. Right-click a column header and select‘Add / Remove Columns’ to select the columns you want to view. You can sort on any of the columns by clicking the corresponding column headers or by selecting the column from the‘Sort By’ menu items in the right-click context menu. The available columns are: As mentioned in the first post on this topic, the IE8 Smart Address Bar works better with Windows Search installed. However, IE8 does not require Windows Search, and IE8 will still provide a superior experience to IE7 if it’s not there. We are going to go through and detail the differences between IE8 with and without Windows Search so people can understand the trade-offs. To start with, we made a choice to use Windows Search as our index& query engine when we began work on IE8 almost two years ago. We could have written our own engine, or we could have used a different engine, but it came down to a simple realization: we have a team of people here at Microsoft who are dedicated to creating a great search& indexing experience, and it’s called the Windows Search team (formerly known as “Windows Desktop Search.” And to avoid any confusion, we’re talking about the local search index team, not the folks who run live.com – those are separate organizations). The people on that team are experts at what they do, and by leveraging their technology, we get the benefit of all of their hard work and expertise. We consider the folks on the Windows Search part of the extended IE team (the same way you can consider, say, the folks on the networking team, who write TCP/IP for Windows, as part of the IE family). Once we made the decision to use Windows Search, the next question was simple: what happens to IE8 when Windows Search is not installed? Well, on one hand, you could argue that IE8 should work just as well with as without Windows Search, but then we’d just be duplicating Windows Search inside IE, which reverses the decision we just decided not to make. So, while it was clear we would have to make some trade-offs in IE8 when Windows Search was not present, we still wanted to make sure that IE8 without Windows Search was superior to IE7. This screenshot shows IE8 on Windows XP, where Windows Search is not included by default: As you can see, even without Windows Search, you still get the new look with Titles, URLs, grouping, and hit highlighting. Typed addresses are still available, and you also get the expandable keyboard shortcut section at the bottom. This is one of those areas where we think the IE8 experience is better than IE7: IE8 is providing richer data back to the user in an easier-to read format. An IE8 user in front of the keyboard of this machine will instantly recognize this as IE8, and therefore should be familiar with the other IE8 features (all of which you can read about here on the IE blog). Despite the new look, underneath, IE8 acts a lot like IE7 did when you type in the address bar. Here are the details about what’s different in IE8 when Windows Search is not available, but first, a primer about Windows Search. Windows Search has two basic parts: an index and a query engine. We’re not going to go into detail about these here, but IE8 works with both parts to return results to users quickly. The part of Windows Search that we rely on when the user types in the address bar is the query engine. It’s fast, and it does a bunch of hard work (like word breaking) for us. It’s the presence of this fast and flexible query engine that enables us to take what you type, search across a huge amount of disparate data, and return results in time measured in milliseconds. Remember that Favorites are file objects, History is represented in an internal WININET container, typed addresses are stored in the registry, and RSS uses structured storage. That’s four different storage mechanisms for four differentdata types, all of which are first class Hi, my name is Helen Drislane, I am a program manager on the IE team responsible for some of the user interface including tabs and I‘m going to discuss the new Tab Grouping feature (tab color!) with you. We had a lot of fun putting this feature together, so I am going to explain a little bit about the process involved in designing it and then describe the things you can do with it. EVOLUTION OF THE DESIGN AND ALGORITHM After shipping Internet Explorer 7, the IE team collected data from user reviews, from IE Feedback on MS Connect, and from other Microsoft product teams. We formed a list of top user requests which included the new Reopen Closed Tab feature, the new tabCrash Recoveryfeature, work to ensure that abad tab would not hang the other tabs, the new Duplicate Tab feature, and many others. That list also includes the following two observation: Today, a tab that is opened from another tab is always put at the end of the tab row. Since it is related to the first tab, it is odd that one has to go searching all the way at the end of the tabs to find it. Based on this feedback, we decided to rework the tab close algorithm so that tab selection is not always placed to the right when a tab is closed, but it is placed on a tab related to the recently closed tab, to get the following behavior: In addition to listening to different IE Feedback channels, we worked with user researchers here at Microsoft to hold Usability Studies in which users came in, browsed the web, and explained why and how they were accomplishing their browsing tasks. During these usability studies, we found a few interesting trends: In the trends described above, the related tabs (whether they are search results or news articles opened from the same website) would ideally not only be placed adjacent to one another but would also have some visual indication of being grouped together so that different tasks could be more easily identifiable. This is when colors came in to play. The idea behind tab grouping is that tabs originating from the same source are grouped together. The image below shows MSNBC with two articles from it opened in green, and a Windows Live search on Seattle restaurants with two search results from it opened in blue: Now with visual indicators on my tabs, I can quickly identify the groups of tabs that are related to different tasks. So if I am switching back to Internet Explorer after using another application, I will quickly identify the blue-colored tabs as information related to the hunt for a good restaurant. Another important aspect of designing this feature was deciding upon the visual indicators for groups. A common question we get is“How do color blind users use tab grouping?” We made sure to include these u Hi, my name is Jatinder Mann and I work on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and Group Policy.Back in June, James Pratt and Jane Maliouta alluded to IEAK improvements for IE8. Today, I will be talking about the work we have done in this area. Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Beta IEAK8 Betais now available publically for everyone to try. To give you some background, the IEAK allows you to deploy customized packages and manage IE settings post deployment within corporations and among Internet Content Providers (ICP) and Internet Service Providers (ISP).For instance, Acme Corp could use IEAK to create a custom IE package for their employees that has Acme favorites, search providers, home pages, Web Slices, Accelerators, and more. We simplified creating, deploying and managing branded IE packages. We optimized the IEAK to help you build your customized IE packages more quickly and to allow you to configure and customize new features in Internet Explorer 8, like Accelerators and Web Slices. In this post, I will be talking about how the IEAK: Customize New Features in IE8 The following new features can be now customized via the IEAK8: Accelerators You can easily include custom defaults for Accelerators: simply point to an XML file for the desired Accelerator, or import existing Accelerators from a local machine. Web Slices In theFavorites, Favorites Bar and Feedsdialog you can now add custom Web Slices by simply clicking on the Web Slice radio button and specifying the Web Slice information. Compatibility View Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 introducesCompatibility Viewwhich is a significant enhancement over the“Emulate IE7” functionality from IE8 Beta 1. You can customize this feature in the Compatibility view dialog. Search Enhancements IE8 supports search providers which offer rich text and image suggestions; through IEAK 8 you can add search providers with suggestions and configure default search providers. Additional IE8 Features Many other IE8 features, likeInPrivate Browsing,Developer Toolsand首页
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Getting Ready
Windows XP Service Pack 3(SP3) users only
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ms-interpolation-mode), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as'-ms-'for Microsoft,'-moz-'for Mozilla,'-o-'for Opera, and so on.'-ms-'prefix:'-ms-'when writing pages for Internet Explorer 8 (please note that if Internet Explorer 8 users are viewing your site inCompatibility View, they will see your page exactly as it would have been rendered in Internet Explorer 7, and in that case the prefix is neither needed nor acknowledged by the parser):Property Type W3C Status -ms-accelerator Extension -ms-background-position-x CSS3 Working Draft -ms-background-position-y CSS3 Working Draft -ms-behavior Extension -ms-block-progression CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-filter Extension -ms-ime-mode Extension -ms-layout-grid CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-layout-grid-char CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-layout-grid-line CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-layout-grid-mode CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-layout-grid-type CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-line-break CSS3 Working Draft -ms-line-grid-mode CSS3 Editor's Draft -ms-interpolation-mode Extension
"firstName":"cyra",
"lastName":"richardson",
"address":{
"streetAddress":"1 Microsoft way",
"city":"Redmond",
"state":"WA",
"postalCode":98052
},
"425-777-7777",
"206-777-7777"
]
}
JScript Team
Product Unit Manager
http://www.example.com—please replace all references of this domain with your own website domain.Defining Your Service
opensearch.xml, so it will be accessible by anyone athttp://www.example.com/opensearch.xml:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>exampleSearch</ShortName>
<Url type="text/html" template="http://www.example.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}" />
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+xml" template="http://www.example.com/suggestions.xml"/>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/icon">http://www.example.com/favicon.ico</Image>
</OpenSearchDescription>text/html, where the user will land after a search—here,results.aspx. The“{searchTerms}” part will automatically be replaced by IE with the user’s search terms. In this sample, I assume your website has an integrated search engine. If it doesn’t, and unless it’s an intrane
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