Internet Explorer 8 Released

After approximately one year of public beta testing, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was released in final form in Mar. 2009. Compared with its predecessors, IE8 offers better standards support, significant privacy improvements, and new user interface features that could help users find information online more quickly. The improvements place IE on par or ahead of competing browsers on nearly every front and should help Microsoft stop IE’s sliding market share, although the improvements may not be enough to get Firefox users to switch back.

No Major Changes from RC1

The final release of IE8 has no significant feature changes from the Jan. 2009 release candidate (RC) version but contains a number of bug fixes and minor interface updates.

Compared with IE7, the new browser offers improvements in the following areas:

Standards support. IE8 is more compliant with new and emerging versions of Web standards and specifications, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1, Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core, and HTML 4.01, all of which are used to design Web pages, and ECMAScript 2.1, which is the latest version of the JavaScript standard used in many Web applications, including Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) applications. Because previous versions of IE did not conform as well to standards, some Web pages designed for earlier versions of the browser may not render properly in IE8. To mitigate this problem, IE8 can display pages in a fashion similar (but not identical) to IE7—a mode called Compatibility View. If users encounter a broken page, they can manually switch to Compatibility View by clicking an icon next to the address bar. Microsoft is also supplying a list of sites that appear best in Compatibility View, and if users enable this list, IE8 will automatically render these sites in the proper format. In addition, Web developers can force pages on their sites to display in Compatibility View by using special meta tags or Hypertext Transfer Protocol headers.