Internet Explorer 8 and the Boring Era of Web Browsers

Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 today, and we’ve been playing with it at PC World. … In this early version, IE 8 is not an upgrade that’s going to bowl you over with amazing new functionality. Microsoft is touting its better compliance with Web standards. (Shouldn’t the world’s dominant browser already be super-compatible with the Web?) It says that IE now recovers from crashes more gracefully. (Wouldn’t it be nicer if it didn’t crash?) A feature called Activities lets developers add functionality to IE in a way that doesn’t seem radically different from things clever sites have done for years with plain ol’ bookmark buttons; Web Slices, which let sites create widgety little snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button, are kind of interesting–but they’ll only take off if they’re widely supported by major sites, and they’re not radically different from Apple’s Web Clip feature in Safari, which works with all Web pages, not just ones designed to support it.

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