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.
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.
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.
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.
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: