Windows Internet Explorer 8 (abbreviated as IE8) is a web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
browser series. The browser was released on March 19, 2009 for Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s...
Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...
Windows Server 2008 R2 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 and launched on October 22, 2009. According to the Windows Server Team blog, the retail availability was September 14, 2009. It is built on Windows NT 6.1, the same core...
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s. As of January 2011, estimates of IE8's global market share ranged from 26-33%.
Internet Explorer 8 is the first version of IE to pass the Acid2
Acid2
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
test, and the last of the major browsers to do so, although it scores only 20/100 on the Acid3
Acid3
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
Test. According to Microsoft, security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
support were its priorities for IE8.
Internet Explorer 8 is the last version of Internet Explorer to be supported on Windows XP; the next version, Internet Explorer 9
Internet Explorer 9
Windows Internet Explorer 9 is the current version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT. Internet Explorer 9 supports several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and...
, is supported only on Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.
History
IE8 development started in at least March 2006. In February 2008, Microsoft sent out private invitations for IE8 Beta 1, and on March 5, 2008, released Beta 1 to the general public, although with a focus on web developers. The release launched with a Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit website promoting IE8 white papers, related software tools, and new features in addition to download links to the Beta. The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) added new sections detailing new IE8 technology. Major press focused on a controversy about Version Targeting, and two new features then called WebSlice and Activities. The readiness toolkit was promoted as something "developers can exploit to make Internet Explorer 8 'light up'."
On August 27, 2008, Microsoft made IE8 Beta 2 generally available. PC World
PC World (magazine)
PC World is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal-technology products and services...
noted various Beta 2 features such as InPrivate mode, tab isolation and color coding, and improved standards and compatibility compared to Internet Explorer 7. Two name changes included Activities to Accelerators, and the IE7 Phishing filter renamed Safety Filter in the first Beta to SmartScreen, both accompanied by incremental technical changes as well. By August 2008 the new feature called InPrivate had taken the spotlight.
The first non-beta version was released on March 19, 2009.
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
Server 2008
Windows 7
Languages
Name
Number
32-bit
64-bit
32-bit
64-bit
32-bit
64-bit
32-bit
64-bit
32-bit
64-bit
Beta 1
8.0.6001.17184
March 5, 2008
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
3
Beta 2
8.0.6001.18241
August 27, 2008
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
25
Partner Build (Pre RC)
8.0.6001.18343
December 10, 2008
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
1
Release Candidate
8.0.6001.18372
January 26, 2009
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
25
Release to Manufacturing
8.0.6001.18702
March 19, 2009
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
25 63*
Release to Manufacturing
8.0.6001.18702IC
May 27, 2010
colspan = 1
colspan = 1
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
colspan = 2
25 63*
*additional languages, for a total of 63 by June 2009, were released, but not all languages are available on all Windows versions.
On January 5, 2009, a tool was provided by Microsoft to block the automatic install of Internet Explorer 8 via Windows Update
Windows Update
Windows Update is a service provided by Microsoft that provides updates for the Microsoft Windows operating system and its installed components, including Internet Explorer...
.
As of May 20, 2009, Windows XPe (Embedded) was not a supported platform for Internet Explorer 8. There have been no announcements of planned support.
On May 27, 2010, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 optimized for Bing and MSN. The file name is BOIE8_ENUS_XP.exe.
Language support
Language support (localization) was not complete on release. IE8 was released with 25 languages. This has grown up to 63 for Vista 32-bit in June 2009. Support for additional languages can come pre-installed based on the OS, or from downloaded "MUI" language packs. MUI stands for Multilingual User Interface.
Features
Internet Explorer 8 contains many new features, including WebSlices and Accelerators.
A selection-based search system is a search engine system in which the user invokes a search query using only the mouse. A selection-based search system allows the user to search the internet for more information about any keyword or phrase contained within a document or webpage in any software...
which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse. 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
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, Accelerators eliminate the need to copy and paste content between web pages. IE8 specifies an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
to be invoked as an Accelerator service. How the service will be invoked and for what categories of content it will show up are specified in the XML file. Similarities have been drawn between Accelerators and the controversial Smart tags
Smart tag (Microsoft)
Smart tags are an early selection-based search feature found in later versions of Microsoft Word, and beta versions of the Internet Explorer 6 web browser by which the application recognizes certain words or types of data and converts it to a hyperlink. Selection-based search allows a user to...
Internet Explorer 6 is the sixth major revision of Internet Explorer, a web browser developed by Microsoft for Windows operating systems...
but withdrawn after criticism (though later included in MS Office).
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.
Automatic Tab crash recovery
If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to the browsing experience. If a tab unexpectedly closes or crashes it is automatically reloaded with the same content as before the crash.
Developer tools
For developers, IE8 includes tools that allow HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
debugging directly from the browser.
Favorites Bar
Another new feature in IE8 is a redesigned Favorites Bar, which can now host content such as Web Slices, web feed
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
s, and documents, in addition to website links.
Inline search within pages
Internet Explorer 8 now has replaced the Find... dialog box with an inline Find toolbar which can be activated by pressing CTRL+F or from search box drop-down menu but the F3 (or any other kind of a keyboard-driven) NextFind command has gone. Internet Explorer 8 highlights all instances of found words while allowing the user to continue the navigation normally.
InPrivate
A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with IE8, and consists of two main features: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering. InPrivate Browsing has been described as a "porn mode" in various news outlets. A similar feature, first introduced in Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in June 2009, adding a variety of new features to Firefox. Version 3.5 was touted as being twice as fast as 3.0...
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
InformationWeek is a weekly print magazine, an online site with corresponding face-to-face and virtual events, and research. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California and was first published in 1979 by CMP Media, later called CMP Technology. On February 29, 2008, CMP Technology was...
mentioned it as a Stealth' Privacy Mode".
InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent one's browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no easily accessible evidence of browsing or search history.
InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third party websites can use to track browsing activity. InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.
As with other private browsing modes there are ways that information about a browsing session can be recovered.
Performance and stability
Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript
JScript
JScript is a scripting language based on the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.JScript is implemented as a Windows Script engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to any application that supports Windows Script, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages,...
In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program...
A memory leak, in computer science , occurs when a computer program consumes memory but is unable to release it back to the operating system. In object-oriented programming, a memory leak happens when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code...
s due to inconsistent handling of circular references between JScript objects and DOM objects were corrected. For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes
Process isolation
Process isolation is a set of different hardware and software technologies designed to protect each operating system process from other processes...
. LCIE prevents glitches and hangs from bringing down the entire browser and leads to higher performance and scalability. Permissions for ActiveX
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
controls have been made more flexible - instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.
Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
filter to include protection from socially engineered malware. Every website and download is checked against a local list of popular legitimate websites, if the site is not listed the entire address is sent to Microsoft for further checks. If it has been labeled as an impostor
Impostor
An impostor or imposter is a person who pretends to be somebody else, often to try to gain financial or social advantages through social engineering, but just as often for purposes of espionage or law enforcement....
or harmful, 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
Homepage
A home page or homepage has various related meanings to do with web sites:* It most often refers to the initial or main web page of a web site, sometimes called the front page ....
, visit the previous site, or continue to the unsafe page. New with SmartScreen in IE8: if a user attempts to download a file from a location reported harmful then the download is cancelled. The effectiveness of SmartScreen filtering is superior to socially engineered malware protection in other browsers
This feature can be disabled or enforced using Group Policy
Group Policy
Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems. Group Policy is a set of rules that control the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. Group Policy provides the centralized management and configuration of operating systems, applications, and...
.
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, uniquely-generated identifier for a short time. The Suggested Sites feature is turned off by default and is disabled when the user is browsing with InPrivate enabled or visiting SSL
Transport Layer Security
Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet...
An internationalized domain name is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics,...
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
Https
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with SSL/TLS protocol to provide encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server...
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
Phoning home
Phoning home, in computing, refers to an act of client to server communication where a client device or client application software reports its location on a network, the currently logged on user, or any other information to a server computer...
Web Slice is a web feed technology introduced in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 that allows certain portions of a web page to be subscribed to. Internet Explorer allows users to preview the subscribed Web Slices in fly-out preview window...
s are snippets of the entire page to which a user can subscribe
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
. 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 hSlicemicroformat
Microformat
A microformat is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support HTML, such as RSS...
Active Desktop was a feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0's optional Windows Desktop Update that allows the user to add HTML content to the desktop, along with some other features. This function was intended to be installed on the then-current Windows 95 operating system...
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
in 1997.
Microsoft donated the specification to the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
The Microsoft Open Specification Promise , is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert legal rights over certain Microsoft patents on implementations of an included list of technologies....
Windows RSS Platform, included in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista is a platform that exposes feed handling and management to Windows applications. The RSS support in Internet Explorer 7 is built on the Windows RSS Platform.-Overview:...
also supports authenticated feeds beginning with Internet Explorer 8.
Zooming and image scaling
Full-page zoom now reflows the text to remove the appearance of horizontal scrollbars on zooming. Image scaling is done using bicubic interpolation
Bicubic interpolation
In mathematics, bicubic interpolation is an extension of cubic interpolation for interpolating data points on a two dimensional regular grid. The interpolated surface is smoother than corresponding surfaces obtained by bilinear interpolation or nearest-neighbor interpolation...
resulting in smoother looking images when scaled.
Using the compatibility mode will cause style issues with <select> form elements when changing zoom levels.
Per-Site ActiveX Controls
The Information bar lets users allow an ActiveX control to run on all Web sites or only the current one (Per-Site basis). Users can easily make changes to this behavior through the Manage Add-ons dialog box. For each ActiveX control there's a list of sites where it has been approved by the user.
Removed features
In Internet Explorer 8, the previous session can no longer be automatically restored the next time. The user must remember to and manually open it the next time.
Address Bar inline AutoComplete
CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode
Opening web folders (must now be done through the drive mapping tools).
Support for the proprietary r> element is dropped
The option to delete files and settings stored by addons or ActiveX controls; rather, it is performed automatically.
Web page links and images can be dragged only to the desktop or to an open Explorer window.
Standards mode
Internet Explorer 8's main rendering mode, known as standards mode, has improved support for various web standards
Web standards
Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites,...
A Rich Internet Application is a Web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, extensive use of JavaScript, or virtual machines...
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
level 1 is fully supported. CSS level 2 is mostly supported, however several rendering bugs and regressions may affect conformance. CSS level 3 is partially supported.
Data: URIs (limited to non-navigable content less than 32KiB)
The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Aspects of the DOM may be addressed and manipulated within the syntax of the programming language in use...
, 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.
Web Storage and DOM Storage are web application software methods and protocols used for storing data in a web browser. Web storage supports persistent data storage, similar to cookies but with a greatly enhanced capacity and no information stored in the HTTP Request Header...
HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and is still under development...
Mathematical Markup Language is an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. It aims at integrating mathematical formulae into World Wide Web pages and other documents...
Significant parts of DOM Level 2 and 3, including the standard event model
DOM Events
DOM events allow event-driven programming languages like JavaScript, JScript, ECMAScript, VBScript and Java to register various event handlers/listeners on the element nodes inside a DOM tree, e.g. HTML, XHTML, XUL and SVG documents....
used by other browsers.
SVG. The fact that IE8 does not support SVG was criticized by Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
test with a score of 20/100. During its development, Microsoft developed over 7,000 tests for CSS level 2 compliance, which were submitted to the W3C for inclusion in their test suite.
Compatibility mode
Internet Explorer 8 was promoted by Microsoft as having stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. This would have been a repetition of the situation with IE7 which, while having fixed bugs from IE6, broke pages that used the IE6-specific hacks to work around its non-compliance. This was especially a problem for offline HTML documents, which may not be updatable (e.g. stored on a read-only medium, such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM).
In computing, version targeting is a technique that allows a group of users utilise some advanced software features that were introduced in a particular software version while allowing users accustomed to the prior versions still utilise the same software as if the new features were never added...
whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element
Meta element
Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML <meta … > element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Multiple elements are often used on the same page: the element is the same, but its attributes are different...
or in the HTTP headers.
In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element
Meta element
Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML <meta … > element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Multiple elements are often used on the same page: the element is the same, but its attributes are different...
into the web page that triggers the "Compatibility mode" in the browser, using:
Adoption
Five weeks after the release of IE 8 Beta 2 in August 2008, Beta 1's market share had grown from 0.05% to 0.61%, according to Net Applications. On July 2009, just under 4 months after the final release, the market share jumped to 13%.
Reviews
On March 19, 2009, review by Benny Har-Even of IT PRO said:
On April 2, 2009, a review by the editor and network engineer Mark Joseph Edwards in the newsletter Windows Secrets said:
System requirements
IE8 requires at least:
Processor speed: 233 MHz
Memory: 64 MB for 32-bit Windows XP/Server 2003, 128 MB for 64-bit Windows XP/Server 2003, and 512 MB for Windows Vista/Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Display: Super VGA (800 x 600) monitor with 256 colors.
Peripherals: Modem or internet connection; mouse or compatible pointing device.
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
Accelerators are a form of selection-based search
A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with IE8, and consists of two main features: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering. InPrivate Browsing has been described as a "porn mode" in various news outlets. A similar feature, first introduced in Safari
Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript
Web Slice