IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
I've made an extension for Internet Explorer 8, FormToAccelerator which turns HTML forms on a web page into either an accelerator or a search
provider. In the design of the accelerators format we intentionally had HTML forms in mind so that it would be easy to create accelerators for existing web services. Consequently, creating an
accelerator from an HTML form is a natural concept and an extension I've been meaning to finish for many months now.
This is similar in concept to the Opera feature that lets you add a form as a search provider. The user experience is very rough and requires some knowledge of accelerator variables. If I can come up with a better interaction model I may update this in the future, but at the moment all the designs I can come up with require way too much effort. Install IE8 RC1 and then try out FormToAccelerator.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.
Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!
The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.
InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.
Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.
When throwing together an HTML page at work that other people will view, I stick the following line in for style. Its IE's error page CSS and contaits a subtle gradient background that I like.
This uses the res URI scheme. You can see the other interesting IE resources using my resource list tool.
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