Guide to Example IE 8 Features

Features info with sample code:

Outlines

The car gallery thumbnails to the left utilize the outline property as seen in the code example below.
> Show Example Code

The Outline properties enable elements to be highlighted without affecting their size. The outline is a shorthand property for outline-color, outline-style, and outline-width.

Enhanced PreParser

Internet Explorer 8 is now more aggressive in downloading items before the page is fully rendered. When a SCRIPT tag is encountered, page processing no longer comes to a halt waiting for the entire script to download. This change will help increase page load performance, without requiring developers or designers to make any changes.

The shorter download times can be seen on this gallery page where a multitude of images are downloaded more efficiently.

Upped Connection Limit on Broadband Connections

Internet Explorer 8 increases the number of concurrent host connections to six. The need for more per-host connections is important given the increase of AJAX applications and pages, many of which send large amounts of data asynchronously. This change will not only benefit AJAX applications, but increase the overall performance for content downloads.