Well, Internet Explorer 8 is here (the beta, at least). And it’s standards compliant (well, it passes Acid2). Which, actually, is something even Firefox can’t say.
Acid2 in IE 8:
Acid2 in Firefox 2.0.0.7:
That means that I no longer need to do conditional stuff for Firefox and Opera, I can do everything once and it’ll look the same (such as the fix for the gap between div tags described here). Of course, I’ll have to account for the fact that, although IE 7 has been out for a year and a half, many people still use IE 6, and will continue to do so when IE 8 is released.
Aside from that, IE 8 has some other new things. “Activities” are selected from a drop-down menu that appears near selected text (this doesn’t seem to work everywhere yet…). “WebSlices” are basically what they sound like - little slices of the web. You define the scope of a WebSlice inside a div tag with an “hslice” class. The browser then adds that to the “Favorites Bar,” and updates itself every once in a while. You can then see that small part of a web page without actually opening it, allowing for things like, say, weather updates (from MSN, obviously…) or status updates from your Facebook friends. The “Favorites Bar” I just mentioned is also new. Think Firefox’s “Bookmarks Toolbar,” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the Favorites Bar. Button links to web pages (like the old “Links Bar”), and drop down RSS feeds. I could only see a couple differences between the Bookmarks Toolbar and this new IE counterpart. The first is the little “Favorites” dropdown thing that shows Favorites, Feeds, and History in different tabs until you click elsewhere in the window (I think they’re called “Explorer Bars,” and they’re not new - they were in IE 7). The other is that this is where those “WebSlices” are stored, which look like a feed button until you press them, and a box with a part of a web site pops up.
Also, I think someone mentioned somewhere that it was starting to support HTML 5, not that I’ve really been able to try that out…
