Yes, we all know that Internet Explorer has given us many troubles. We have spent most of our development time for designing the website just to show properly in Internet Explorer. Let see if our lives will be easier when working with IE8.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. It describes the new features that developers can exploit to make Internet Explorer 8 ‘light up’. These features include Activities, WebSlices, improvements in CSS support, innovations in AJAX functionality, improvements in DOM L2 Core support, and integrated Developer Tools. Here are the following main improvements of Internet Explorer 8.

• Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any Web page.
• WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.
• While one of Internet Explorer 8’s main goals is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also forward looking towards CSS3. CSS3 is the next step in the evolution of Cascading Style Sheets, and unlike CSS 2.1 which consists of one single document, the CSS3 specification is broken down into different modules in order to increase the speed of converging on clear specifications and implementations of different features.
• Internet Explorer 8 includes tools that Web developers need to efficiently debug their sites directly in Internet Explorer. Developers can immediately debug a site’s HTML, CSS, and JScript from within Internet Explorer 8, rather than switch between Internet Explorer and a separate development environment.
• Internet Explorer 8 provides a simplified yet powerful programming model for AJAX development that spans browser, webpage, and server interaction. As a result, it is easier for you to build webpages that have much better end-user experiences, are more functional, and have better performance.
• During Internet Explorer 6’s long tenure as the leading market-share holder, Web developers revealed many bugs and inconsistencies in Internet Explorer’s DOM. Today, with the Internet Explorer 8 versioning plan, these bugs and inconsistencies are corrected by default, and those customers who choose to opt out of this behavior may enable IE7 compatibility mode.

Source: Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit