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Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta, New Features In IE8

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:50:43 +0000

Updated Post with more new under the hood features of IE 8.

In the recent news it was announced that IE 8 Passes the ACID 2 test and will render in standard mode by default. The folks at Neowin have managed to uncover links to Internet Explorer 8 Download page and also a list of upcoming features in IE 8.

Here is the link to download Internet explorer 8 beta 1 and a list of new features in IE 8.

Note: The download links currently don’t work try them later.

Below are the list of new features found in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Whats New For Users

Activities

Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

WebSlices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows^®Internet Explorer^® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Improved Phishing Filter

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

Whats New For Developer

Better AJAX Development

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer is offline.
Connectivity events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.
Six connections per host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked to a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimize their downloads based on a scriptable property.
XMLHTTPRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.

Cross-domain communication is an integral part of AJAX development and mashup Web applications. Internet Explorer 8 includes two features to help you build cross-domain communications that are safe and easy to implement:

With Cross-domain Request (XDR), developers can create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this request, called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure and fast.
Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.

DOM Core Improvements

Internet Explorer’s object model does not distinguish properties from attributes. This makes it impossible for a property (.href) to return a different value than an attribute (getAttribute(‘href’)).
Core attribute operations are broken: Getters and setters behave inconsistently given certain parameters. An oft-cited example is getAttribute(’style’), which returns the style object rather than a string as expected.

Internet Explorer 8 fixes many of the cross-browser inconsistencies in these two areas. Specifically, the following bugs in core areas have been fixed:

Separate URL handing for properties and attributes such that relative URLs can be retrieved via an attribute and absolute URLs can be retrieved via a property.
Fix element’s attribute array modifiers—getAttribute, setAttribute, and removeAttribute have cross-browser compatible implementations.
Other attribute-related API fixes implemented.

Platform Performance Improvements

Internet Explorer 8 includes several changes that improve the performance of Web sites. These changes affect many Internet Explorer subsystems, including the HTML parser, CSS rule processing, markup-tree manipulation as well as the JScript garbage collector and runtime.

The majority of these changes will affect performance only, with little to no functional effect on most Web sites. However, they may expose aspects of Web sites that depend on the timing of operations or performance of the browser. In addition, those Web sites that unknowingly access objects after they are freed may find such access failing in Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8’s performance improvements affect each site loaded in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the chosen rendering mode.

Circular Memory Leak Mitigation

Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to memory management. These improvements mitigate memory leaks that were previously created by circular references between JScript objects and DOM objects.

This feature may affect the behavior of webpages that depend on garbage memory that, only as the result of a memory leak, existed in previous versions of Internet Explorer. In Internet Explorer 8, these pages will reference unallocated memory and generate a fault.

This feature affects each website displayed in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the site’s chosen rendering mode.

HTML Improvements and ACID2

HTML uses elements to represent both structure and meaning in a document. To help developers take full advantage of the elements that HTML 4 offers, and to better provide the semantic meaning intended by Web author, Internet Explorer 8 has upgraded support of the following presentational elements:

The P element: Represents a logical paragraph.
The OBJECT element: May represent any object including images.

Through improved support of these HTML elements, Web developers may build more expressive and accessible HTML markup.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Windows Tags: Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards, Windows

Why Virtualization Is The Future

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:35:16 +0000

Intel and other chip makers are moving towards multi-core architectures which means you can run each OS on a single core. In the coming years most people won’t be satisfied with running a single OS, they would like to have the best of both worlds. As a web designer I need to check my website on different web browsers and platforms, virtualization gives me an easy way to deal with this. Another use of virtualization is that people can use the a virtual OS to surf and use the Internet or install and test out new softwares without worrying about cluttering and infecting their computers with spyware or viruses . Intel Capital took a $218.5 million stake in virtualization company VMWare. It will interesting to see what comes out of this. I run both Ubuntu and a trial version on Vista on Vmware, wish I could run MACOSX too (you can run a MACOSX on vmware but its illegal, google for OSX86 to find out more) Though thankfully Apple released Safari for windows recently. I guess by the time leopard is out Safari too will be out of beta for windows.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Software Tags: Software, Windows

Google Announces "Gears" Offline Support For Web Applications

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 31 May 2007 06:08:25 +0000

Robert Scoble has the scoop. Google Developers day is in progress and on the first day Google has released a new technology called “Gears“ to enable offline support for web based applications. This is not a new technology it has been showcased before, it mostly based on JavaScript and Flash, now that Google has officially released a toolkit we can hope to see a wide spread adoption of offline support for other web applications.

What is Google Gears

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

Store and serve application resources locally

Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database

Run asynchronous JavaScript to improve application responsiveness

Gears works on Macs, Windows, Linux on IE, Firefox. Opera support isn’t finished yet and Safari support will be coming “later.”

They have also released a new version of Google Reader Today which has offline support enabled. You’ll need to install the Gears Extension for your browser to see it in action.

If you are a developer head over to the developers page to see some demos and documentation.

Google has also released a A new Mashup editor that is aimed at developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript. The Google Mashup Editor offers a simpler way to deploy AJAX user interface components atop existing feeds and Google Web Services. This is currently a limited beta, so you’ll have to sign up and wait for it.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Google, Windows Tags: Google, Software, Windows

Breaking News Microsoft Announces Release Of Microsoft Surface.

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 30 May 2007 07:27:29 +0000

Micorosft just announced the the release of Microsoft Surface. Microsoft Surface™, the first commercially available surface computer from Microsoft Corp., turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that’s easy for individuals or small groups to interact with in a way that feels familiar, just like in the real world. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more. Soon to be available in restaurants, hotels, retail establishments and public entertainment venues, this experience will transform the way people shop, dine, entertain and live.

How does Surface work?

At a high level, Surface uses cameras to sense objects, hand gestures and touch. This user input is then processed and the result is displayed on the surface using rear projection.

What is surface computing?

Surface computing is a new way of working with computers that moves beyond the traditional mouse-and-keyboard experience. It is a natural user interface that allows people to interact with digital content the same way they have interacted with everyday items such as photos, paintbrushes and music their entire life: with their hands, with gestures and by putting real-world objects on the surface. Surface computing opens up a whole new category of products for users to interact with.

What are the key attributes of surface computing?

Surface computing has four key attributes:

Direct interaction. Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands and interact with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
Multi-touch contact. Surface computing recognizes many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger, as with a typical touch screen, but up to dozens and dozens of items at once.
Multi-user experience. The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
Object recognition. Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.

Microsoft Surface responds to touch, gestures and objects placed on the surface

Front view of Microsoft Surface

With Microsoft Surface, order a beverage during your meal with just the tap of a finger.

Microsoft Surface puts restaurants, hotels, shopping and theaters at your fingertips.

Use Microsoft Surface to quickly browse through music, dragging favourite songs onto a personal playlist.

View, sort, stack and organize photos with your hands on Microsoft Surface.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Microsoft, Windows Tags: Microsoft, Windows

Yahoo To Stop Email Spam Forever With DKIM

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 23 May 2007 02:13:18 +0000

The Yahoo blog has listed out how they plan to stop spammers, spoofers, and phishers everywhere.

We’ve just reached an important milestone in our battle against email scammers. Today, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a proposed Internet standard — RFC 4871. That’s bad news for spammers, spoofers, and phishers everywhere.

DKIM is an email authentication framework that addresses the widespread
issue of email forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the
sender. It allows email providers to validate an email’s originating
domain, making use of blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also
makes phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive
domains.

How DomainKeys Works

How it Works – Sending Servers

There are two steps to signing an email with DomainKeys:

Set up: The domain owner (typically the team running the email systems within a company or service provider) generates a public/private key pair to use for signing all outgoing messages (multiple key pairs are allowed). The public key is published in DNS, and the private key is made available to their DomainKey-enabled outbound email servers. This is step “A” in the diagram to the right.
Signing: When each email is sent by an authorized end-user within the domain, the DomainKey-enabled email system automatically uses the stored private key to generate a digital signature of the message. This signature is then pre-pended as a header to the email, and the email is sent on to the target recipient’s mail server. This is step “B” in the diagram to the right.

How it Works – Receiving Servers

There are three steps to verifying a signed email:

Preparing: The DomainKeys-enabled receiving email system extracts the signature and claimed From: domain from the email headers and fetches the public key from DNS for the claimed From: domain. This is step “C” in the diagram to the right.
Verifying: The public key from DNS is then used by the receiving mail system to verify that the signature was generated by the matching private key. This proves that the email was truly sent by, and with the permission of, the claimed sending From: domain and that its headers and content weren’t altered during transfer.
Delivering: The receiving email system applies local policies based on the results of the signature test. If the domain is verified and other anti-spam tests don’t catch it, the email can be delivered to the user’s inbox. If the signature fails to verify, or there isn’t one, the email can be dropped, flagged, or quarantined. This is step “D” in the diagram on the right.

In general, Yahoo! expects that DomainKeys will be verified by the receiving email servers. However, end-user mail clients could also be modified to verify signatures and take action on the results.

For more technical Details Head over to the yahoo antispam page

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Web, Windows Tags: Windows