Thread: Early Days: IE 8

Unlike the new Firefox and Safari browsers, which are ready to roll, Microsoft's ear¬ly beta of Internet Explorer 8 remains a work in progress, But IE 8 beta 1 does provide a glimpse of new features such as WebSlices, which let sites create widgety snippets of information you can view by clicking a bookmark button. You can add a Web¬Slice to your Favorites bar to link to an eBay auction, say, or to a friend's Facebook profile-and it will update with the latest information, just as an RSS feed would.

A second new feature is Activities: When you select text, a small green arrow
appears. Clicking it opens a drop-down menu with op¬tions for translating the text, looking it up on a map (if it's an address), or finding a definition. You can choose which Web services to use for each activity when you install IE 8, much as you are prompted to choose a de¬fault search provider for IE 7. Right-clicking a selected text block or a page will link you to activities, too.



One of the best improve¬ments in IE 8 is also one of the simplest: At any site you visit, IE grays out all but the domain name in the address bar. This antiphishing mea¬sure helps you spot the com¬mon scammers' technique of
disguising the real domain in a URL that may start with something like 'www.pay¬pal.com' and list the actual domain at the end of a string of nonsensical characters made to look like site input.

Microsoft says that it is also working to improve IE 7's phishing filter; and IE 8 continues to support EV cer¬tificates, as IE 7 does.