The Xbox 360 soft­ware update is due to roll out today, and among the many new fea­tures brings an Inter­net Explor­er app, let­ting you browse the web on your TV (if you’re an Xbox Live Gold mem­ber). I was part of the Beta test pro­gramme and have been using Xbox IE for a few months, so here fol­low some of my thoughts, in a kind of review. Apolo­gies in advance for the crap­py photos.

Read the full article

I down­loaded the IE9 Beta last night, and while I haven’t had the chance to give it a prop­er once-over yet, I’m pret­ty impressed with its capa­bil­i­ties so far. The real star is the hard­ware accel­er­a­tion, which opens pages so fast it seems like mag­ic. The new HTML5 and CSS3 sup­port is very welcome.

You can read an in-depth review of it at ZDNet, except it seems to be writ­ten by some­one who does­n’t real­ly under­stand CSS very well.

Read the full article

HTML5 allows the use of block ele­ments inside the a tag, which was not per­mit­ted in HTML4. This means that you can wrap a link around whole sec­tions of markup, mak­ing all of the child ele­ments of the a become the link. You use it like so:

<a href="http://example.com">
  <div>
    <h3>I'm an example</h3>
  </div>
</a>

You can begin to use this straight away, as every brows­er sup­ports it — although you must be wary of one rather glar­ing bug in Inter­net Explorer.

Read the full article

One of the new fea­tures already announced for IE8 is Web­Slices; essen­tial­ly, the abil­i­ty to sub­scribe to any part of a web page, even if it does­n’t have an RSS feed. It sounds some­what sim­i­lar to Fire­fox’s Micro­sum­maries fea­ture*, although it’s a) eas­i­er to imple­ment, b) more flex­i­ble, and c) not buried in the brows­er where no-one could ever find it.

Read the full article

Chris Wil­son, Plat­form Archi­tect for Inter­net Explor­er at Microsoft, has revealed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at Web Direc­tions South 2007 that the next ver­sion of IE will have a new­ly-writ­ten lay­out engine, as opposed to the fix­es patched on for IE7.

The slides of the pre­sen­ta­tion are avail­able now, and in an inter­view with Sitepoint.com he explains a lit­tle more:

Read the full article