There's been quite a bit posted in the IEBlog about Internet Explorer 8 over the past couple of days, and with all the time I've been spending on redesigning my blog I've not until now had the time to post about these.
The first one I want to comment on is about the fuss they're trying to create around IE8's privacy features. The main point of this article is that they've added a number of features that make it easier to stop pages you've been browsing from being traceable. Now there's only two reasons I can think of that would make you want pages to be private - one of them is the case where you're on a public machine, the other I'll leave to your imagination. These two new features are:
- InPrivate Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data
- Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you've visited websites.
- InPrivate Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it
"Delete Browsing History" sounds to me like a feature that's been in IE for a long time, but it could be they've added more settings to control this. While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:
- New cookies are not stored
- All new cookies become "session" cookies
- Existing cookies can still be read
- The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
- New history entries will not be recorded
- New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
- Form data is not stored
- Passwords are not stored
- Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
- Queries entered into the search box are not stored
- Visited links will not be stored
Apparently these new features will make their way into IE8 Beta 2, which they also say is due to be released shortly.
The next post I want to talk about is what they say about IE8 Performance. Whilst Mozilla have recently claimed that their JavaScript performance is now 26 times faster in a version they're currently working on, Microsoft claim that JScript (their implementation of JavaScript) is 2.5 times faster than in previous versions. Although they can talk about performance increases all they like it doesn't really mean anything until the FINAL release of IE8 is in user's hands. Between now and it's release there could be any number of changes that they make that cause the browser to be slowed down. I'm sure some of you may remember that Firefox 2 Beta's were in some cases faster than the final release of Firefox 2.
As we started building IE8 it was clear that we could do more to take advantage of the increasing prevalence of high bandwidth connections. Two key improvements we made with IE8 were to unblock downloads in the presence of external scripts and to increase the number of parallel connections per server that we support.
Can that be clashed as cheating? I'm not sure, but I think some servers won't allow more than two concurrent connections per user anyway. Still, as I said we'll just have to wait and see what difference this makes - if any.
