Microsoft Student Partners

As most of you know by now, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has been released, reviewed and even made it to the main-stream media.

So, as to not bore you by reiterating the new features and benchmarks, I shall jump straight into some of my insights and things that interest me with the latest Beta.

Accelerators

For those of you who gave up on IE8 after Beta 1, Accelerators are the evolution (or plain renaming) of Activities. For anyone who didn’t read the above links, the concept behind Accelerators is to avoid the “Select-Copy-New Tab-Open Page-Paste-Submit” paradigm of other browsers, but to switch to “Select->Accelerate”. In non marketing speak, this simply means that you can select text and have it submitted to a webpage.

One thing that I was very disappointed in was the shear lack of available accelerators at the time of launch. I would have imagined that every blogging, mapping, searching, translating, encyclopedic and dictionary site on the internet would have submitted an activity for their site (if only for get a couple more hits per day). Instead I was greeted by less that 10 accelerators, mostly from Google and Microsoft.

Determined to help, I read the suggested MSDN page and promptly created the “Define in Wikipedia” and “Search in Google Australia” accelerators, and am currently working on one for Where Is (although it is likely to be difficult, seeing as Where Is requires the search term to be divided into Street\Suburb\State (as opposed to Google\Live Maps’ “give me everything, and I’ll figure out what you meant” approach)).

Also, if you want an accelerator made, and doing a bit of XML appears daunting, feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll see what I can do for you.

DEP

Data Execution Prevention – Microsoft’s (quite successful, but unpopular) attempt at protecting the memory for applications has risen its head again in the new beta of IE8 – though not to the extent of the first beta.

I did notice one HUGE improvement though – after having “Internet Explorer Stopped Working” and letting Vista submit its crash report, and then finding DEP telling me it killed IE and asking for a pat on its head* I noticed that the IE window was still open. In fact, only one tab had changed – the one with the Flash Player. It appears that Flash triggered DEP but, rather than killing the entire browser, IE8 now has the ability to kill one tab and leave the rest untouched. Additionally, the tab displayed an error page that offered suggestions on how to fix the problem and a link that explains what DEP is and why it is important.

Overall, it appears that IE 8 Beta 2 is much improved, but may still need some work. One feature that I am looking for is to extend the Add-In manager such that extensions like Flash, IE Pro, etc do not need their own installers (that is, IE installs them).

– Daniel
Curtin MSP

*I imagine DEP to be much like a misguided guard dog. While it may protect your house (computer) from bad guys, it occasionally will drop a chewed up pair of slippers at your feet, and then look to you for a pat of approval. Guess it gives extra meaning to “The dog ate my homework…”