IE8 features

Here's short summary of IE8 features announced at Microsoft Developer Days in Minsk:

1. JavaScript improvements:
a. Totally rewritten Garbage Collector - performance gain
b. String operations improved - performance gain
c. Collections operations improved - performance gain

2. Development improvements:
a. JavaScript debugging
b. On-fly changing of literally anything at the page
c. JavaScript profiler
d. XMLHTTPRequest now can be cancelled
e. added JavaScript event for connection interrupts

3. Standards and compatibility
a. fully supports W3C recommendations
b. compatibility modes for previous IEs: 7th engine and 5th & 6th emulation
c. HTML 5
d. CSS 2.1

4. User features
a. Web Slices - like RSS, only much better and with visualization :)
b. URL parts are clickable - useful for websites with sitemap
c. each tab is a single process - if it crashes nothing happens to other tabs


Bad news: no IE8 at the end of November :( More details here.