Microsoft has released information about whats it adding to IE8. The changes for developers look pretty good.
The biggest things I see are:
- The selectors API (built selecting elements by css, there is an inprogress w3c spec for this, Webkit also implements the api in its beta)
- Better developer tools
- Lots of new AJAX stuff
AJAX wise most of the changes are implementing bug fixes and new APIs from the HTML 5 spec (DOM Storage, firing hashChanged events, XDM).
There also seems to be a new XDR API for making requests to other domains. The API is simple but I’m not sure if the security model is good enough not to cause long term problems. If anyone finds/writes a review of XDR and its security implications please let me know.
Internet Explorer 8 have been my most used browser this year, it is definitely stable and fast loading too. “