Microsoft has kept development of Internet Explorer 8 pretty quiet, but already the next major version of the most widely-used browser is available for downloading in a beta version.
While the focus of IE 7 was on security and the incorporation of a tabbed interface, version 8’s main features center on stability and usability.
In terms of stability, IE 8’s new automatic crash recovery feature is designed to solve one major problem that most IE users know all too well. Today, when an IE window or tab freezes or crashes, other browsers instances or tabs will likely become inoperable as well.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Automatic crash recovery does a better job of isolating instances of the IE browser — or separate tabs within the same browser — so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other. If a crash does bring down the entire browser, automatic crash recovery will attempt to restore the browser to its previous state — including all open tabs — the next time you open it.
Greater stability is fine — but ultimately boring. Luckily, that’s not all IE 8 has going for it. The new browser’s usability features will generate the most buzz — and are likely to tempt lots of folks to give IE 8 a try.
The new Activities feature, for instance, attempts to save you a lot of time by cutting down on the number of separate sites that you have to visit to accomplish a task. In essence, the Activities feature allows you to invoke the essential services offered on separate sites without ever leaving the page you’re currently on.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re reading a Web page and you see an address for a restaurant you’d like to visit. Today, in order to get directions to that address, you would probably go to a mapping site and type or paste the address in and then wait for the service to provide you with a map from, say, your apartment to the restaurant. The process is time-consuming and involves at least two browser windows and tabs, plus a bit of copying a pasting.
With IE 8’s Activities feature, when you select the address, a small Activities button appears next to your mouse cursor. Clicking that Activities button brings up a context-sensitive menu of possible activities, with one of the options being the ability to map the tool using your favorite mapping site.
Selecting that mapping option actually invokes the mapping site in a smaller preview window inside the current browser tab. Another Activity might pull from a review site of restaurants, allowing you to see what others have said about the restaurant without your having to visit another site.
The Activities feature was also created with a nod toward the growing popularity of social networking sites. Just as you can pull services from other sites, the Activities feature also allows you to push information to popular networking sites such as Facebook and Digg.
If you want to refer a friend to the page from which you got the address for the restaurant, for instance, you can select the Send to Facebook option on the Activities menu, and IE 8 will log you into Facebook, send the URL to Facebook, and present you with the Facebook page that allows you to add an entry.
A set of default Activities comes with the IE 8 browser, but you easily customize the service providers that appear on your Activities list.
Another time-saving feature of IE 8 is called Web Slices, which are designed to allow you to subscribe to frequently-updated portions, or “slices,” of certain Web sites. Instead of spending your time visiting three or four Web sites to get updated information from a portion of each of those sites, you would simply use Web Slices to pull that information into a single location in IE 8.
A site such as eBay, for instance, lends itself to the Web Slices feature. Say, for instance, that you’re running or watching several auctions on eBay. Typically, you would visit eBay multiple times per day to check the status of those auctions.
With Web Slices, you can instead simply subscribe to a section of the auction page by clicking a Web Slice icon that appears when you allow your mouse cursor to hover over a portion of a site that is frequently updated.
Clicking the Web Slice icon adds a new button to a Favorites bar that appears above your browser tabs. Clicking the newly-created Web Slice button on the IE 8 Favorites bar will pull the latest data from your subscribed page and show it to you in a preview window. You can visit the page itself merely by clicking a link within the preview window.
As with Activities, Web Slice-enabled sections of sites must be made available by Web site owners themselves. The code for doing so is fairly simple and non-proprietary, however, so it will likely simply be a matter of time before many sites become “IE 8 aware” and users start seeing the Activities and Web Slices icons as they surf their favorite sites.
You can download the beta version of IE 8 from Microsoft’s preview site (www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx for English and www.microsoft.com/taiwan/download/ for Chinese).
It’s always a pleasure to see something one has long advocated slowly become reality. The late August visit of a delegation to the Philippines led by Deputy Minister of Agriculture Huang Chao-ching (黃昭欽), Chair of Chinese International Economic Cooperation Association Joseph Lyu (呂桔誠) and US-Taiwan Business Council vice president, Lotta Danielsson, was yet another example of how the two nations are drawing closer together. The security threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), along with their complementary economies, is finally fostering growth in ties. Interestingly, officials from both sides often refer to a shared Austronesian heritage when arguing for
The ultimate goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the total and overwhelming domination of everything within the sphere of what it considers China and deems as theirs. All decision-making by the CCP must be understood through that lens. Any decision made is to entrench — or ideally expand that power. They are fiercely hostile to anything that weakens or compromises their control of “China.” By design, they will stop at nothing to ensure that there is no distinction between the CCP and the Chinese nation, people, culture, civilization, religion, economy, property, military or government — they are all subsidiary
Nov.10 to Nov.16 As he moved a large stone that had fallen from a truck near his field, 65-year-old Lin Yuan (林淵) felt a sudden urge. He fetched his tools and began to carve. The recently retired farmer had been feeling restless after a lifetime of hard labor in Yuchi Township (魚池), Nantou County. His first piece, Stone Fairy Maiden (石仙姑), completed in 1977, was reportedly a representation of his late wife. This version of how Lin began his late-life art career is recorded in Nantou County historian Teng Hsiang-yang’s (鄧相揚) 2009 biography of him. His expressive work eventually caught the attention
Late last month the Executive Yuan approved a proposal from the Ministry of Labor to allow the hospitality industry to recruit mid-level migrant workers. The industry, surveys said, was short 6,600 laborers. In reality, it is already heavily using illegal foreign workers — foreign wives of foreign residents who cannot work, runaways and illegally moonlighting factory workers. The proposal thus merely legalizes what already exists. The government could generate a similar legal labor supply simply by legalizing moonlighting and permitting spouses of legal residents to work legally on their current visa. But after 30 years of advocating for that reform,
RSS