The web at your service
Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page. Internet Explorer 8 introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or a user discovering a new online service. Be one of the first developers to take advantage of improvements in Internet Explorer 8 for your websites and applications

Features

Over the last ten years, the intensity of web usage and people's reliance on the web has increased dramatically. The evolution of the web has introduced a new set of opportunities, immersive experiences, online services, and standards. Daily life without the web is simply hard for many people to imagine.

With this intensity and reliance, web developers and designers face an evolving set of needs including:

* Interoperability and compatibility
* Built-in tools that help both first time and experienced developers and designers get pages built right
* Browser capabilities that enable innovative experiences

Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page and introduce a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web, whether you are a web developer writing to standards or a user discovering a new online service.


Activities

Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. Activities typically involve one of two types of actions:

* "Look up" information related to data in the current webpage
* "Send" content from the current webpage to another application

WebSlices

Users commonly visit many websites several times a day to check for updates. The introduction of RSS feeds can make this experience easier for users, although RSS feeds requires a nontrivial amount of work on behalf of the developer.

WebSlices is a new feature for websites that enables users to subscribe to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds in that users can subscribe to them and receive update notifications when the content changes. Websites are polled at user-defined intervals, similar to the way RSS feeds are polled. Website operators may also define a minimum wait time between polls to minimize requests.

Developers can mark parts of webpages as "WebSlices" and enable users to monitor information they rely on as they move about the web. With a click in the Favorites bar, users see rich "WebSlice" visuals and developers establish a valuable, persistent end-user connection.