Techno Babble

Just announced … Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is a developer preview and is intended for web designers and developers to help prepare their websites for the launch of the next version of Internet Explorer.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/…/ie/ie8/default.mspx

CAUTION This is version 1, BETA software and you should treat it accordingly. You may want to consider carefully before actually installing it on your machine. You may also wish to read the disclaimer available from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/…/ie8/readiness/Disclaimer.htm 

The beta version is available for both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Some of the new features include:

Activities are contextual services that provide ready access to external services from any web-page. They provide the ability to

• Look Up information related to data in the current webpage
• Send content from the current webpage to another application

Learn more about Activities here

WebSlices are portions of a webpage that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links toolbar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes.

Learn more about WebSlices 

Choice of layout engine

3 modes will be available (determined using X-UA-Compatible headers)

• Quirks mode - to support IE 5 and legacy browsers
• Strict mode - which supports IE7 and can also be accessed through the "emulate IE7" button
• IE 8 standards mode (the default)

Cascading style sheets 2.1 compliance

HTML improvements

resolving many cross-browser inconsistencies including

• separate URL handling for attributes
• get/set/remove attribute now compatible with other browsers
• support for default HTML attributes

Improved namespace support

Platform performance improvements

Built-in Developer tools

Improved Security

Additional features will be provided in subsequent versions but Beta 1 includes:

• Enhanced protection from deceptive web-sites, by analysing the full URL string
• Domain Highlighting, which highlights the top level domain in the address bar enabling a user to quickly confirm that they are indeed visiting their intended web-site

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You can open multiple home page tabs when starting IE or Firefox as shown below:

In IE

Open the General tab from the menu item Tools…Internet Options

and simply enter the address of each page you want to open in a separate tab on a different line in the Home Page list box, as indicated.

In Firefox

Open the Main tab from the menu item Tools…Options

and add the address of each page required separated by a vertical bar ‘|’ character as shown.

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Tagged: Firefox, Home Page, IE, Multiple Tabs

A web debugging proxy which is used to log traffic between an application and the internet. It allows you to “fiddle” with the in-coming and out-going data.

Available for Internet Explorer and Firefox amongst other applications.

Details available from

http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

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The IE Developer Toolbar provides a number of features for extracting more detail from web pages.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92716

You get the ability to

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.