Internet Explorer 8 - new features

2 minute read


Hi all,</p>

I recently installed Internet Explorer 8 in my laptop and wondering many new features about the IE8. I was enjoying the good and new features of IE8. However, I was not aware what these features are called, from where they came and can I install my own new features in to my IE 8 browser etc.?

One feature which I firstly observed in IE8 was, when I select some text on browser then I see one icon comes up. On click of that icon one menu box opened up and it suggests me many actions to do like, search it with Bing,  Blog with Window Live, Mail with Window Live, etc.  I was not aware that this feature is called Accelerator and we can install our own custom accelerators as well !

Then I learned more about the IE8 and found that There are such 8 new features in IE8 as below.

  1. Defining Page Regions with Web Slices

Web Slice is one of the cool features of IE8. It allows you to divide the page in various parts, see and update the only part in which you are interested.

For example suppose, you visited amazon.com and saw the price of camera which you wish to buy. If you want to track the price of your selected camera so that the moment it's price will decrease you will buy that camera. For doing this you have to daily visit the same site and search for your camera and look its price.

But, if you are browsing in IE8 then on hover at the part of the camera on the browser, you may see there will one icon will come up. On Click of that icon, pop-up window will crop up with massage subscribe to this web slice. By subscribing to that webslice, you will see that one new tab will come at the menu bar of the browser. That tab will show you the title of the camera and on click of the tab it will show the small pop-up that will display the current updated price of your selected camera. It keeps update automatically without refreshing your browser.

Now you need not go to the whole amazon site, search for your camera and see the current update price daily daily.

The other features are as below.

2. Expiration and Update Frequency

3. Accelerators

4. Search Suggestions

On typing the search content IE8 will show you suggested texts. You can give your own suggested texts by installing various search suggestion providers.

5. AJAX Navigation

6. DOM Storage

DOM storage allows to store and retrieve data at client side using unique key. Data size can be up to 10 MB.

7. Offline and Online Working Modes

8. XMLHttpRequest Time Outs

Internet Explorer 8 provides a new client-side object called XDomainRequest, which allows developers to access remote domains without requiring implementation of a server-side proxy. If the remote server provides an Http Header called Access-Control-Allow-Origin:* all other remote sites will be able to request data from the current Web page. The client-side use of XDomainRequest object is the same as the ordinary XmlHttpRequest.

Please read article New Features in IE8 written by Daron Yöndem. He has explained entire above mentioned 8 points aptly.
</font>