Internet Explorer 8
[12] The release launched with a Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit website promoting IE8 white papers, related software tools, and new features in addition to download links to the Beta.
[15] PC World noted various Beta 2 features such as InPrivate mode, tab isolation and color-coding, and improved standards and compatibility compared to Internet Explorer 7.
[16] On January 5, 2009, a tool was provided by Microsoft to block the automatic install of Internet Explorer 8 via Windows Update.
[20] Support for additional languages can come pre-installed based on the OS, or downloaded and installed via Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packages.
[27] On October 13, 2020, Microsoft released the final IE8 update for Windows Embedded Standard 7, marking the end of IE8 support on all platforms.
[29][30] Accelerators are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.
[32] Similarities have been drawn between Accelerators and the controversial Smart tags feature experimented with in the IE 6 Beta but withdrawn after criticism (though later included in MS Office).
The inline autocomplete feature has been dropped from Internet Explorer 8, leading to criticism by beta users.
[citation needed] For developers, Internet Explorer 8 includes tools that allow debugging HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and VBScript within the browser.
InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third party websites can use to track browsing activity.
Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript runtime and the associated garbage collector.
[43] For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes.
LCIE prevents glitches and hangs from bringing down the entire browser and leads to higher performance and scalability.
Permissions for ActiveX controls have been made more flexible – instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.
[31] Web Slices are kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.
[53] Using the Compatibility View mode will cause style issues with
The information bar lets users allow an ActiveX control to run on all Web sites or only the current one.
[68] In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element into the web page that triggers the "Compatibility View" mode in the browser, using:[60] Five weeks after the release of IE8 Beta 2 in August 2008, Beta 1's market share had grown from 0.05 percent to 0.61 percent, according to Net Applications.
"[74] The next month, on April 2, Mark Joseph Edwards wrote in the newsletter Windows Secrets that the new edition of Internet Explorer had greatly improved security, speed, and compatibility, but opined that it still lagged behind competitors in all three areas.
"[75] Around 2010, a theme named "BlueSky" was created for the Mozilla Firefox browser with the aim to resemble the graphical user interface of Internet Explorer 8 as accurately as possible.
