Dean Hachamovitch Keynote - 1

Dean is responsible for IE 8. And he is talking about 8 points (because developers can count higher than 3). If you've given presentations, you'll understand that reference.

1. CSS 2.1

There are issues with CSS support in IE7. IE8 addresses these by focusing on full support for CSS 2.1 standard.

2. CSS Certification

Getting certified is the best way to ensure that all browsers will render standard CSS correctly. Microsoft has provided a large number of test cases to include in the certification process. The problem will be backwards compatibility. There are instances where pages look gook in IE7, but don't look good in Firefox. Because IE8 is more CSS compliant, it also looks bad in IE8. There is, however, an IE7 compatibility more (under control of the page developer) to force IE8 to work like IE7

3. Performance

They have improved JS script performance by a factor of approx 2.5 times. Not always as good as Firefox/Mozilla, but a great improvement over IE7. And they are still working on it.

4. HTML 5 Support

The back button doesn't work well with AJAX functionality. Sometimes 'Back' doesn't get you what you expect. Support for HTML 5 means (among other things) an interaction that is more like what the use expects

Also, HTML 5 support includes network awareness. A connection gets lost and the page responds, including the ability to modify the content of the page.

5. Developer Tools

IE8 includes built-in developer tools. Includes a script debugging window, complete with breakpoints, watches, an immediate window, etc.

Also includes the CSS debugging info similar to what is found in Visual Studio 2008. When you select a particular element in the document, you can see the styles which are applied to the element. This allows 'wrong' style values to be quickly identified with regards to their source.

6. Activities

Activities are context-sensitive bits on a web page. Select text and quickly get to a map of the address it represents. Or find the selected item on Ebay. "Quickly' invokes a right click or selecting from an Activities menu that is similar in location to the Exception Helper in Visual Studio.The context for the selection is provided through an architecture known as OpenService format. It is called the OpenService Specification and Microsoft has made it available for comment.

7. WebSlices

The Web Slice is a part of a web page that contains basically a summary (a slice) of another web page. Provides quick, pop-up summary of a separate web page. A summary of a Facebook friend can be  retrieved through either a context-sensitive click or a toolbar click. And the current page is not left.

The is a WebSlices spec that contains the details.

8. IE 8 Beta 1 is now available. Or at least, after the keynote.