On the Horizon

Firefox and Internet Explorer are each due for a refresh this year. These are the expected highlights. I am currently beta testing IE8 and the webslice feature is pretty cool. Stay tuned for more...

Firefox 3

More Security

• One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed.
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. You can test it here (note: our blacklist of malware sites is not yet activated).

Improved Performance

• Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.
• Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 1, and will show further gains in future Beta releases.

Internet Explorer 8

Choice of layout engine

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 will ship in standards mode by default. However, users can set three different rendering modes using the X-UA-Compatible header:

• Quirks mode which supports Internet Explorer 5 and legacy browsers
• Strict mode which supports Internet Explorer 7 and is accessed through the emulate IE 7 button
• Internet Explorer 8 standards mode

Cascading style sheets 2.1 compliance

The Internet Explorer 8 layout engine is built to be cascading style sheets 2.1 compliant, enabling web developers and designers to write their pages once and have them render properly across all cascading style sheets 2.1 compatible browsers. However, Microsoft is not finished—hence, Microsoft is seeking feedback from developers working with Internet Explorer 8 Developer Beta 1.

HTML improvements

Many cross-browser inconsistencies have been fixed in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, including:

• Separate URL handing for attributes.
• The get/set/remove attribute implementations are now compatible with those of other browsers.
• Default attributes for HTML are supported so that they always exist on elements whether specified in the markup or not.

Improved namespace support

Internet Explorer 8 simplifies the use of standards-compliant XML-based webpages that support namespace features like scalable vector graphics, XML user interface language, mathematical markup language, and others.

Platform performance improvements

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 improves performance in many Internet Explorer subsystems, such as the HTML parser, cascading style sheets rule processing, markup tree manipulation, the JScript parser, garbage collector runtime, and memory management. More performance work is planned for later beta releases.