Expect crash recovery features in new IE8 builds

Late Wednesday, a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews that a TechEd session in Orlando today summarized some of Internet Explorer 8's key new features for administrators, one of them being crash recovery.

One much improved feature added to the earliest public betas of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is its ability to remember and recall open pages on a forced exit or a crash -- a feature which was originally integrated into Firefox 2.0, but which frankly didn't work all that well. That version crashed more often, in our experience, and only sometimes recalled its previous state.

Similar functionality is likely to be added to IE8, BetaNews was told today by Microsoft. The list of additions also included three other items which, we were surprised to note, were more confirmations of what we already knew rather than indications of new things to come. First of all, administrators will be able to add IE8 to their image-based deployments of Windows Vista, using System Center Configuration Manager. (If they couldn't, that would be a problem.)

How IE8 manages the rendering of Web pages standardized for IE7 and earlier versions will be controllable via group policy. For example, suppose an enterprise uses an intranet whose appearance was geared for IE7. Under IE8's more standards-compliant rendering defaults, that intranet could end up looking ghastly -- like an entirely different kind of acid test altogether. Group policy could conceivably ensure that when IE8 is deployed, the intranet looks as it should, while the rest of the Internet comes through in standards-compliant mode.

That's a welcome addition, though the first hints of it coming to IE8 were whispered back in January.

Finally, Microsoft has acknowledged it will update its Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) in time for IE8. This is so administrators can create a customized installation image for IE8 alone, and that's useful in cases like the intranet-endowed enterprise above, or when an organization uses a VPN to enable its employees to log on. Security settings and bookmarks may need to be standardized to ensure all employees are seeing the same image of IE8 on their laptops.

Another way to customize IE8 to accomplish the very same purpose may be through that System Center Configuration Manager deployment, although not all organizations are comfortable yet with making the move to Vista.