Let's take a look at IE8...
Lets IE want's to bring these features to the table and since it gets beat by Firefox even Chrome sometimes I think it needs a great change to become as dominate as in it's past.
Personally the speed needs to improve I made Firefox go faster by overclocking it. New Firefox might be a up and comer but it's a valuable software. The IE had virtually no competitors since creation. What made IE so famous was that in comes in every major PC with Windows since 1995 it had no competition then Firefox came in and split its fans. Wikipedia says IE had approximately 95% of the total market by 1999. That's a lot but it's gone way down since Firefox and Chrome.
All the best,
Mocro
Features
The first beta release of IE8, which was demonstrated at the MIX08 conference, contained many new features, including WebSlices and Activities.[12] In the second beta release, Activities were renamed to Accelerators.[13]
[edit] Added features
[edit] Suggested Sites
This feature is described by Microsoft as a tool to suggest websites, which is done by the browser sending information to Microsoft over a secure connection, which keeps the information and a per-session, uniqely-generated identifier for a short time.[14] Suggested Sites is off by default, and disabled when the user is browsing with InPrivate enabled, or is visiting SSL-secured, intranet, IP address, or IDN address sites. Potentially personally-identifiable information such as the user's IP address and browser information is sent to Microsoft as an artifact of the HTTPS protocol. Microsoft has stated that they do not store this information.
The functionality was defended by Microsoft after itworld.com's Gregg Keizer described it as a "phone home" feature.[15]
[edit] InPrivate
Internet Explorer 8 in InPrivate mode.
A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with Beta 2, which consists of three main features: InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscription.[11] Like similar privacy protection modes in Safari and Google Chrome, InPrivate Browsing has been described as a "porn mode" in various news outlets.[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Informationweek mentioned it as a "'Stealth' Privacy Mode".[24]
Gregg Keizer of Computerworld says Private Blocking "notifies users of third-party content that can track browsing history", and that InPrivate Subscription allows "subscribing to lists of sites to block".[24] When enabled, IE8 will not save browsing and searching history, cookies, form data and passwords; it also will automatically clear the browser cache.[24]
[edit] Accelerators
Example of a map Accelerator using the IE8 Accelerators Smart tag.
Accelerators are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.[25] Actions such as selecting the text or other objects will give users access to the usable Accelerator services (such as blogging with the selected text, or viewing a map of a selected geographical location), which can then be invoked with the selected object. According to Microsoft, Accelerators eliminate the need to copy and paste content between web pages.[12] IE8 specifies an XML-based encoding which allows a web application or web service to be invoked as an Accelerator service. How the service will be invoked and for what categories of content it will show up is specified in the XML file.[26] Similarities have been drawn between Accelerators and the controversial Smart tags, feature experimented with in the IE 6 Beta but withdrawn after criticism (though later included in MS Office).[7]
This is an example of how to describe a map Accelerator using the OpenService Format:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<homepageUrl>http://www.example.com</homepageUrl>
<display><name>Map with Example.com</name><icon>http://www.example.com/favicon.ico</icon></display>
<activity category="map"><activityAction context="selection">
<preview action="http://www.example.com/geotager.html">
<parameter name="b" value="{selection}" /><parameter name="clean" value="true" />
<parameter name="w" value="320" /><parameter name="h" value="240" />
</preview>
<execute action="http://www.example.com/default.html">
<parameter name="where1" value="{selection}" type="text" />
</execute>
</activityAction></activity>
</openServiceDescription>
[edit] Web Slices
IE8 Favorites menu displaying a WebSlice in a flyout Window
Web Slices are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to.[25] Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals. Developers can mark parts of the pages as Web Slices, using the hAtom and hSlice microformat. Web Slices have been compared to Active Desktop, introduced in Internet Explorer 4 in 1997.[27]
Microsoft donated the specification to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. It is also covered by the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.[28]
[edit] Autocomplete changes
The address bar features domain highlighting for added security so that the top-level domain is shown in black whereas the other parts of the URL are grayed out. Domain highlighting cannot be turned off by users or web sites. Other features of the address bar include support for pasting multi-line URLs and an improved model for inserting the selection caret, and selecting words, or entire URLs in the Address bar. The inline autocomplete feature has been dropped from Internet Explorer 8, leading to criticism by beta users.[29]
[edit] SmartScreen Filter
SmartScreen Filter is an extension of Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter. If a user visits a site which has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, then Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited. From there, the user can either visit his or her homepage, visit the previous site, or continue to the unsafe page.[30] This feature can be disabled using Group Policy.
Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools in a JavaScript debugging session.
[edit] Developer tools
For developers, IE8 includes tools that allow HTML, CSS and JavaScript debugging directly from the browser.[26]
[edit] Favorites Bar
Other new features in IE8 include a redesigned Favorites Bar, which can now host content such as Web Slices, web feeds as well as documents, in addition to website links.
[edit] Automatic crash recovery
A crash recovery mechanism has been incorporated; if the browser crashes, web pages being viewed may be recovered, at the user's discretion, when the browser is restarted.[25]
[edit] Zooming
Full-page zoom now reflows the text to remove the appearance of horizontal scrollbars on zooming.[31]
[edit] Performance and stability
The architecture of IE8.
Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript runtime and the associated garbage collector. Circular Memory leaks, which resulted earlier due to inconsistent handling of JScript objects and DOM objects, have been alleviated.[26] For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes. Glitches and hangs don't bring down the entire browser. It also leads to higher performance and scalability. Permissions for ActiveX controls have been made more granular - instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.[31]
[edit] Rendering engine
IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards (like HTML, CSS and JavaScript) in standards mode.[32] Such changes might cause it to break compatibility as its behavior differs significantly from that of IE7.[33] In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element into the web page, that triggers the "IE7 standards mode" in the browser, using:[32]
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
While the behavior of the browser is unchanged from Internet Explorer 7 in "IE7 Standards Mode", in standards mode (the default IE8 rendering mode), IE8 supports Data: URIs, HTML object fallback, the abbr tag, CSS generated content and the display: table CSS rule, in addition to fixing a lot of CSS and HTML parsing bugs.[34] As a result, IE8 Beta 1 passes the Acid2 test in IE8 standards mode (now called "standards mode").[34][35] Also, the proprietary hasLayout property will be eliminated when using IE8 in IE8 standards mode.[36] IE8 fails the Acid3 test, scoring 20 from Internet Explorer 7's 14. Microsoft has stated that Internet Explorer 8 improves only some of the standards being tested by Acid3.[37]
Compliance with the CSS 2.1 specification was a stated goal in Internet Explorer 8 by Microsoft, even including an attempt to support some CSS3 features. IE8 fully supports CSS 2.1 Paged media (including the @page CSS rule and the left, right and first page selectors). In addition, it also supports the DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM) and the Selectors APIs. IE8 also adds cross-domain communication via the XDomainRequest object, that exposes a programming model similar to XMLHttpRequest. IE8 features an enhanced and standardized DOM, that brings it in line with implementations in other browsers. Attributes and properties in DOM objects are now handled differently, and the behavior of the getAttribute, setAttribute and removeAttribute modifiers have been changed to match the behavior of other browsers.[26] Internet Explorer 8 also supports the Accessible Rich Internet Applications(ARIA) specification for enhanced accessibility in Ajax-based rich Internet applications.[31]