Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday. It is now available for public to download.

It look similar to current IE 7 but with some enhancement.

IE 8 crash out as soon as after I installed Google Toolbar. I uninstall it and it works fine and I reinstall it back again, and again IE 8 crash out. It did the same with Yahoo Toolbar. Well, I guess there is some incompatibility issue between Google Toolbar and Yahoo Toolbar with IE 8. Very often the IE 8 will pop up with the error message box “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” This is really ridiculous and it crashes out more often than IE 7.

Will Microsoft going to include torrent client/downloader into this final version fo IE 8? We shall all wait and see. It would be great if Microsoft do so.

Activities

WebSlices

Internet Explorer 8 allows users to confidently bank, communicate, and shop online with these capabilities:

• Enhanced protection from deceptive websites: As part of an ongoing commitment to privacy and security, Microsoft is making enhancements to the phishing filter in Internet Explorer 8 to provide additional protection against evolving threats to the consumer. With the Safety Filter, Internet Explorer 8 will now protect against a broader set of online threats by analyzing the complete URL string or address, providing enhanced capabilities to detect current and future exploits.
• Protection from deceptive URLs masquerading as legitimate brands: Domain Highlighting highlights the top level domain in the address bar, helping users to quickly confirm that the website they are visiting is the site they intended to visit. The domain name is in bold and black font, standing out from other characters in the URL, which are gray.

• Enhanced ActiveX Controls: Internet Explorer 8 offers greater control over who can install Microsoft ActiveX controls and on which sites the ActiveX controls are allowed to run. It offer per-site and per-user.
• Data Execution Prevention (DEP): In Internet Explorer 8, DEP is on by default for systems running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and can help prevent damage to your computer from viruses and other security threats by preventing certain types of code from writing to executable memory space. DEP will automatically close the browser tab the control is attempting to execute in and terminate the executable. DEP/NX is not a cure-all against all memory-based vulnerabilities. But when combined with other technologies, DEP/NX helps prevent reliable exploitation of common buffer overflow exploits. No additional user interaction is required to provide this protection, and no new prompts are introduced.
• Cross Domain Request (XDomainRequest): With XDomain Request, developers can securely request public resources from another domain’s server so that both parties know which sites are sharing information, facilitating the ability for developers to create cross-site data aggregation scenarios.
• Cross Document Messaging (XDM): This developer feature enables the sender to guarantee messages are only received by a specified recipient and ensures that each message is tagged with its origin.

Last updated on 30th May 2008.