Microsoft announced the launch of Inter­net Explor­er 8 yes­ter­day; I urge every­one to down­load it as soon as pos­si­ble, and to encour­age their friends to do like­wise — espe­cial­ly if their friends are using IE6. It’s great that we have anoth­er stan­dards-com­pli­ant brows­er on the mar­ket, and I hope that adop­tion is swift.

What I would real­ly like to see from Microsoft now is a series of iter­a­tive releas­es intro­duc­ing new stan­dards; rather than wait­ing three years for IE9, I would much rather wait one year for IE8.1. Gen­er­al man­ag­er, Dean Hachamovitch, has stat­ed that there is a com­mit­ment on their side as long as test suites exist, so I call on all brows­er mak­ers and stan­dards bod­ies to work togeth­er to achieve that.

The Inter­net Explor­er team have announced the (first?) release can­di­date of IE8 (down­load it here). I used it briefly last night and it seems per­fect­ly sta­ble; I doubt it will change much (if at all) before the final version.

If you know any­one who uses IE as their pri­ma­ry brows­er, encour­age them to update as soon as pos­si­ble; we need to get every­one onto stan­dards-com­pli­ant browsers so we can stop wast­ing time pan­der­ing to IE6.

With IE8 expect­ed to be released in the near future, now’s a good time to make sure you know all about its new fea­tures; hand­i­ly, the lat­est issue of Code Focus mag­a­zine is an IE8 spe­cial, with arti­cles on sub­jects rang­ing from web­site com­pat­i­bil­i­ty to AJAX performance.

Today is my penul­ti­mate day in my cur­rent job; next week I’m going on a trip to Spain, and when I get back I’m start­ing my new job at the award-win­ning Pre­loaded agency. My focus will be shift­ing away from client-side devel­op­ment and onto infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; it’s a fan­tas­tic chal­lenge for me, and I’m very excit­ed about work­ing on top brands for a top agency.

I’ve been slow­ly intro­duc­ing IA into my role over the past three years, and so this is a log­i­cal step for me to take. I’ll be sad to leave my cur­rent agency, but delight­ed to be mov­ing to some­where I’ll be able to focus on what I think are the next hot top­ics on the web: find­abil­i­ty & usability.

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Last night Microsoft announced the release of the sec­ond beta of Inter­net Explor­er 8, which is no doubt very sim­i­lar to the final release ver­sion. You can down­load it from microsoft.com/ie8 (notes on upgrad­ing).

Web­mon­key have a nice round-up of the new fea­tures, so I won’t both­er repeat­ing that; instead, here are my first impres­sions after an hour or so’s use.

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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.

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