Partner Otaku

I came across this article in PC Magazine about IE8 written by Edward Mendelson. It’s always nice to find tips that can improve your browsing experience.  I’ll list them out for you here, but read the article for more detail. I’ve used IE 8 since it was in beta and these are helpful.

1. Select Text with Keyboard – Useful when you want to copy text within a webpage (my personal favorite of the bunch!)
2. Compatibility View – Helps correctly render web pages that were designed for earlier versions of IE
3. InPrivate Browsing – Browse without storing traces of your visits on your own computer in the form of cookies, history items, or cached pages
4. InPrivate Filtering – This prevents display ads from following you to other sites
5. Add More Accelerators – Provides useful shortcuts when you highlight items on the page
6. Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering and Third-Party Filters – similar to the ad-blocking extensions in Firefox
7. Suggested Sites – Microsoft will send you sights based on your browsing history
8. Customize the Toolbars – Self Explanatory
9. Status Bar – Clicking or double-clicking can reveal short cuts to menu selections

Around the third week April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on WinXP, Vista, Win Server 2003 or 2008 will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This will be a staged roll out over time to the entire user base.

• Windows XP and Win Server 2003, the update will be categorized as High Priority
• Vista and Win Server 2008, the update will be categorized as Important
• IE will not automatically install on their machines. Users must opt-in.

Reference Links:

Prepare for Automatic Update Distribution of IE8

IE8 Blocker Toolkit Available Today!

Blocker Toolkit to disable automatic delivery

I’ve seen a lot of interest about IE8 at the Partner Architect Briefings that we’ve been hosting that few weeks. Internet Explorer 8 displays content in its most standards compliant way and this can cause compatibility problems on websites that still expect the older versions of IE. You can override IE’s default behavior by choosing to view a site in Compatibility View – there’s an icon that appears next to the ‘Stop’ and ‘Refresh’ buttons in the address bar that controls this.

The IE8 team created a landing page on MSDN that discusses the details of the Compatibility View List.Visit the site and it will help answer the following:

• What process did the Internet Explorer team follow to create the list?
• Is my site / domain on the list?
• How do I remove my site / domain from the list?

The IE8 team created a living tracking spreadsheet  including domain name, when the site was added, and the current status. The Compatibility View List is updated on a regular cadence of two months or so. The status field helps site owners determine whether the currently shipping version has satisfied the removal request or whether the removal request will happen in an upcoming version of the list.

http://tinyurl.com/dxsl4s (compatiblity view list)

Here’s a few links for IE8 that you might find useful.