14 DAY TRIAL // It's on more than one occasion that rival browsers “swimming” in JavaScript have made Internet Explorer look like a fish out of water. Just the past week, Google released Chrome Experiments, a collection of content tailored to the Chrome browser and its V8 JavaScript engine, some of which are perfectly capable of illustrating IE8's JS shortcomings. Still, Microsoft is insisting that IE8's JScript 5.8 engine has evolved along with the rest of the browser. The software giant pointed out even early in the beta development stage that Internet Explorer 8 was tweaked to include JavaScript performance optimizations, while the browser was also sporting enhancements as native JSON support.
“Version 5.8 of the JScript engine (shipped as a part of IE8) introduced an opt-in versioning mechanism for all the new and breaking language features. The JScript engine now exposes new language features only when the layout (document) mode is set to “IE8 Standards Mode.” Versioned JScript language features available in this release include native JSON support and accessor methods for enabling Document Object Model prototypes,” revealed Shreesh Dubey, product unit manager, JScript.
Microsoft is boasting a 40% increase in AJAX performance in Internet Explorer 8 compared to its precursor, IE7. This is valid for commonly used operations in AJAX applications, Dubey underlined. In this regard, the Redmond company focused on delivering targeted performance improvements in JScript. The same is valid for Internet Explore 8's browser stack. Microsoft emphasized that JScript and AJAX enhancements were designed to respond to real-world scenarios, by boosting the speed of the browser.
“In addition to addressing bugs that were reported during the betas and our internal testing, we have added some user requested changes in the developer tools. A more seamless debugging experience, profiling multi-frame web pages and searching the profile reports using the search bar are some of the cool features we have added. We think developer tools will make life a whole lot easier for you web developers out there,” Dubey added.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).