IE8 development started in or before March 2006. In February 2008, Microsoft sent out private invitations for IE8 Beta 1, and on March 5, 2008, released Beta 1 to the general public, although with a focus on web developers. The release launched with a Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit website promoting IE8 white papers, related software tools, and new features in addition to download links to the Beta. Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) added new sections detailing new IE8 technology. Major press focused on a controversy about Version Targeting, and two new features then called WebSlice and Activities. The readiness toolkit was promoted as something "developers can exploit to make Internet Explorer 8 'light up'."
On January 5, 2009, a tool was provided by Microsoft to block the automatic install of Internet Explorer 8 via Windows Update.
IE8 reached general availability on March 19, 2009. A version optimized for Bing and MSN was also available.
Language support (localization) was not complete on release. IE8 was released with 25 languages. This grew up to 63 for 32-bit in June 2009. Support for additional languages can come pre-installed based on the OS, or downloaded and installed via Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packages.
Support for IE8 on most supported Windows versions ended on January 12, 2016, when Microsoft began requiring customers to use the latest version of Internet Explorer available for each Windows version. For versions of Windows in which IE8 was the final version of Internet Explorer available, support ended alongside the end of support for that version of Windows. This meant that support for IE8 on XP ended with its end of extended support on April 8, 2014. On October 13, 2020, Microsoft released the final IE8 update for Windows Embedded Standard 7, marking the end of IE8 support on all platforms.
If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to the browsing experience. If a tab unexpectedly closes or crashes it is automatically reloaded with the same content as before the crash.
A new security mode called InPrivate debuted with IE8, and consists of two main features: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering. InPrivate Browsing has been described as a "porn mode" in various news outlets. A similar feature, first introduced in Safari in 2005, was later implemented in Firefox 3.5, Opera 10.5, and Google Chrome.
When a user uses InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8, one's browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords are not retained by the browser, leaving no local evidence of browsing or search history.
InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third party websites can use to track browsing activity. InPrivate Subscriptions allow users to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.
As with other private browsing modes, there are ways that information about a browsing session can be recovered.
Internet Explorer 8 includes performance improvements across the HTML parser, CSS engine, mark-up tree manipulation as well as the JScript runtime and the associated garbage collector. Memory leaks due to inconsistent handling of circular references between JScript objects and DOM objects were corrected. For better security and stability, IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes. LCIE prevents glitches and hangs from bringing down the entire browser and leads to higher performance and scalability. Permissions for ActiveX controls have been made more flexible – instead of enabling or disabling them globally, they can now be allowed on a per-site basis.
This feature is described by Microsoft as a tool to suggest websites, which is done by the browser sending information to Microsoft over a secure connection, which keeps the information and a per-session, uniquely generated identifier for a short time. The Suggested Sites feature is turned off by default and is disabled when the user is browsing with InPrivate enabled or visiting SSL-secured, intranet, IP address, or IDN address sites. Information that could be personally identifiable, such as the user's IP address and browser information is sent to Microsoft as an artifact of the HTTPS protocol. Microsoft has stated that they do not store this information.
The functionality was defended by Microsoft after itworld.com's Gregg Keizer described it as a "phone home" feature.
Windows RSS Platform also supports authenticated feeds beginning with Internet Explorer 8.
Full-page zoom now reflows the text to remove the appearance of horizontal scrollbars on zooming. Image scaling is done using bicubic interpolation resulting in smoother looking images when scaled.
The information bar lets users allow an ActiveX control to run on all Web sites or only the current one. Users can easily make changes to this behavior through the Manage Add-ons dialog box. For each ActiveX control, there's a list of sites where it has been approved by the user.
Internet Explorer 8's main rendering mode, known as standards mode, has improved support for various web standards, especially CSS, compared to Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions.
Internet Explorer 8 was promoted by Microsoft as having stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. This would have been a repetition of the situation with IE7 which, while having fixed bugs from IE6, broke pages that used the IE6-specific hacks to work around its non-compliance. This was especially a problem for offline HTML documents, which may not be updatable (e.g., stored on a read-only medium, such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM).
In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element into the web page that triggers the "Compatibility View" mode in the browser, using:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
Five weeks after the release of IE8 Beta 2 in August 2008, Beta 1's market share had grown from 0.05 percent to 0.61 percent, according to Net Applications. In July 2009, just under four months after the final release, the market share jumped to 13 percent.
As of September 2013, estimates of IE8's global market share ranged from 6.93% to 8.73%.
According to a Net Applications web analytics report from October 2014, Internet Explorer 8 accounted for 17.31% of web traffic, now overtaken by IE11 in usage.
In a March 19, 2009, review, Benny Har-Even of IT PRO offered some praise of Internet Explorer 8, noting its reliability and good features and concluding that it was "certainly the best version of Internet Explorer in a long time," but also that "there's not yet anything here to make Firefox users want to jump ship." He offered praise to Microsoft for paying attention to their competition and producing "a better featured, faster and more reliable browsing experience for the masses" and suggested that as Microsoft continues to improve the product, it would become "harder to persuade the unconverted to switch away from IE."
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