Chris Wilson: Inside IE8 Beta 1 For Developers

Posted By: Charles | Mar 5th @ 10:38 AM

Today, we release IE8 Beta 1 to the world! It's a developer-focused version of IE 8 (thus the name) with a host of new dev features. Chris Wilson, Platform Architect and long time IE team veteran sits down with me to dig into the details of IE8 Beta 1. Some of coolest new features include Activities, Webslices, Javascript debugging and tools, DOM storage, AJAX enhancemnets, cross-Domain AJAX, and more. Chris also talks about the core architecture of IE8 (Trident, MSHTML, etc).

Tune in.

Check out a detailed walk through of Webslices on Visitmix. Also, Channel 10 has a broad overview of these with demos!

Low res file here.

Tags: Ajax, IE8, Internet Explorer, Javascript

Rating:

Views (15,593)

Comments (13)

Downloads

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

IE7 made me come to Channel 9 - and now we are already at IE8. Awesome!!! Big Smile

figuerres
???

Great news.... next we will see the "Broken Sites" whe we try to get our html right for all....

but that's ok, has to be etc...

gunnark

I wish that they would give us the ability to clear the SSL cache from Javascript like in the mozilla base browers. This is very imported when using client certificates store on a smart card to authentication users to a site. There is no way to clear/close the SSL on logout, unless you close IE. When you revised the site you are not prompted for PIN code again, becuse the SSL session is alive.

In mozilla you can for example do:

function register() {
window.crypto.enableSmartCardEvents=true;
document.addEventListener("smartcard-remove",<callback>,false);
};

For closing SSL session:
function logout() {
window.crypto.logout
};

There is noway to clear SSL cache even from a ActiveX Control (With calling something undocumented)

-gk

JChung2006

I installed IE8b1 and am loving it! The new CSS and JavaScript debugging services in the IE Developer Toolbar are a killer app in my book! Great job!

Hakime

Webslices a new feature? You are kidding, right? I mean it would be nice that the folks of channel9 just go out a little to see what is going on. Webslices is nothing more than a ripp off of Webclip, a feature introduced in Safari for Mac OS 10.5. At least IE folks could be honest and clearly admit that they took the idea from Safari and they ripped it off. That won't kill them....

Nidonocu
The Poison Bunny

Hakime wrote:

Webslices a new feature? You are kidding, right? I mean it would be nice that the folks of channel9 just go out a little to see what is going on. Webslices is nothing more than a ripp off of Webclip, a feature introduced in Safari for Mac OS 10.5. At least IE folks could be honest and clearly admit that they took the idea from Safari and they ripped it off. That won't kill them....

Webclips are quite different and require the user to select the area of the page they want to monitor, select it and manually create a watch for it where in the background, a full rendering of the page will be being downloaded and rendered on to the OS X dashboard.

Webslices are webmaster designed miniblocks designed specifically for the purpose of being served to the user, takes up far less resources (not being rendered when the browser isn't open, smaller download of updated content by the feed sync service) and requires less work from the user (two left mouse button clicks).

It was probably inspired by Safari's webclips, but this is a far better solution than the ad-hoc work around of that browser (which isn't supported on the Windows platform of course).

Jhaks

Hakime wrote:

Webslices a new feature? You are kidding, right? I mean it would be nice that the folks of channel9 just go out a little to see what is going on. Webslices is nothing more than a ripp off of Webclip, a feature introduced in Safari for Mac OS 10.5. At least IE folks could be honest and clearly admit that they took the idea from Safari and they ripped it off. That won't kill them....

I think there is are a lot of differences between the two features. They both let you view partial contents of a page but the usage and implementation are very different.

Web clips in OSX are widgets not browser items and if I'm not mistaken it loads the entire web page when you look at the widget but clips out the portion of the web page you want to see which you have to manually set. This doesn't really take into account if the page changes layout or that you really shouldn't have to load or grab the entire page to see only part of it.

Webslices are provided by web pages (not users as in the case of webclips) that want provide quick views of parts of their site. To create a web slice you annotate the section of your page you want to be a slice with some tags and properties. When a user goes to the site there will be a hover button near the webslice that a user clicks to add the slice. A link is then added to the links bar and whenever the content is updated the link title will be bolded like an RSS feed. When you click the link only the content for the webslice is loaded and it doesn't matter if the page layout changes since the specific content is directly annotated to be a slice. For example if I want to get updates on four ebay auctions I can easily do it within a few seconds. Not to mention I will know when the auctions change without having to check the webslice. With clips it would take me much longer to create the widgets, I would have to check them to see if they update and if the page changed I would have to re-adjust the clip region. Web clips are not dynamic and too manual to be useful for a wide verity of content and a lot of users have mentioned this after using it for a while.

Edit:
Oops. Nidonocu, looks like you said what I was about to say. My rendition might be a little verbose though. Anyways Webslices and activities look like really useful features.