At the first day of the Mix08 conference, Microsoft demonstrated the first beta release of its Internet Explorer 8 Web brwoser, and also made the beta avaliable for download to developers and Web authors. The industry has been watching the development of EI8 carefully, since inconsistent and missing support for Web standards developed by the W3C mean many serious Web sites essentially have to build every page twice: once for standards-complaint browsers like Firefox and Safari, and once again (or the same pages riddled with tweaks) for Internet Explorer.
IE8’s main feature will be better standards compliance, and Microsoft announced last week that IE8 will default to a standards-compliant mode, rather than a “quirks mode” that renders pages designed with all of IE5’s previous shortcomings in mind. The result may be that pages specifically authored to work in existing, non-standards-compliant versions of Internet Explorer may not work or display properly in IE8…but pages that comply with Web standards should only need to be written once to work in all major browsers.
The first beta release of IE8 is aimed at developers and Web authors who need to prepare their products and pages for the new browser; it is not a consumer-ready release, and still has many rendering and interface quirks. The IE8 beta features a selection of built-in debugging and testing tools, touts CSS 2.1 compliance (the browser passes the Acid2 test, which previous versions failed miserably). However, developers are already complaining that IE8’s standards mode is significantly slower than it’s quirks mode.
The browser also sports a new feature called “Web slices” that enables a user to subscribe to a portion of a Web page (like abox with traffic info), rather than the whole thing. IE8 also offers”Activities” that enable users to perform common actions on data in Web pages, like look up addresses or exerpt for a blog, without having to copy-and-paste information.
By defaulting IE8’s rendering engine to standards mode, Microsoft may be heading off criticism (and future antitrust action) from the European Union and other organizations that Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market interferes with interoperability and third-party products. It’s not much of an exaggeration to describe much Web development over the last several years as working around shortcomings in Internet Explorer. Nonetheless, even if Microsoft were to release IE8 today, it will take a considerable amount of time for a standards-compliant version of Internet Explorer to gain significant market share: worldwide, about one Web user in three still uses IE6…and that means sites will have to develop with IE6 in mind for some time to come.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).