Foxmarks is becoming Xmarks

Foxmarks is an essential Bookmarking add-on. Foxmarks backs up your bookmarks every time you make changes. You can View and restore your old bookmarks on their web site. Foxmarks has been available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Now, Foxmarks is becoming Xmarks. It’s just not a name change, but they are also enhancing the browser add-on and web site with new capabilities.

With the upgrade from Foxmarks to Xmarks, you’ll still enjoy bookmark sync, backup and all the features you love about Foxmarks. In addition, Xmarks adds new discovery features:

1. Smarter Search
Xmarks will highlight the three sites in your Google results that have been bookmarked by the most people; this is a quick and easy way to tell which sites are most valued by real people like you.

2. Site Info
Xmarks adds a small blue information icon in your browser location bar. Click it to learn more about the site you are on and see recommendations for the top five similar sites. This is a great way to uncover the best of the web.

3. Xmarks.com
Visit Xmarks.com from any browser to write your own site reviews and to see even more similar site recommendations.

Xmarks is currently Firefox only, but it syncs perfectly with your existing Foxmarks Web account and the Foxmarks add-ons for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

You’ll also notice that Foxmarks.com is still a separate site. In the coming weeks, Foxmarks website will be fully rebranded and also release an Xmarks upgrade for the Internet Explorer and Safari add-ons.

Welcome to the all new and improved Xmarks.

First look – Internet Explorer 8 (RC1)

Microsoft made available Internet Explorer 8 RC1 (release candidate 1), which means that as far as Microsoft is concerned, IE8 is cooked and that barring anything major, this will become the final release. So, what’s the new browser like?

A new release of IE is always important because this is the browser that many millions of Windows users will be surfing the web with daily. Like it or not, by the very fact that IE is knitted into every Windows installation makes this an important event.

After what seemed like years of stagnation, Microsoft is continuing the tradition of kitting out IE8 with features that users of other browsers take for granted. According to its team blog, the latest version of the browser includes some general performance improvements, plus added security to avoid clickjacking attempts and some very nice features built-in, including:

* Smart Address Bar
The address bar isn’t now just a place to type URLs into. The Smart Address bar in IE8 tries to make sense of what the user is looking for by retrieving sites visited from the history and bookmarks. This is handy for those times when you want to find something but can’t remember where you saw it.
* Enhanced find
Sometimes it’s not finding the site that’s difficult, but finding where on the page you need to look for the information that you are after. IE8 offers a broad range of enhanced and improved tools to help you spot the information you are after. One such example if this is result highlighting.
* Tab groups
When one tab is opened from another one, the new tab is placed next to the one from which it was opened, and both are marked with a colored tab. This is a good way to keep track of your open tabs.
* InPrivate
Along with keeping track of stuff that you might later want to refer back to, IE8 also gives you powerful tools that allow the browser to have temporary amnesia in relation to the sites you’ve visited by temporarily halting the writing of information to the cache and history.
* Crash recovery
If your IE locks up of crashes while you’ve a shed-load of tabs open, with IE8 there’s a good chance that when you fire up the browser again that it will remember what what sites you had open and fire them up again. It can also reload information that you had typed into forms.

The RC1 version of IE8 is compatible with Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows Server releases. It’s not currently compatible with Microsoft’s Windows 7 Beta operating system, which comes with its own version of IE8.

What are Webslices?

A webslice is a part of a webpage that updates and can be subscribed to for example, a weather forecast.
Internet Explorer (IE) 8, a beta from Microsoft includes WebSlices as one of its features.

WebSlice just works as RSS Feeds works, where user can subscribe and get updates without visiting individual WebPages.

But a Webslice is different that a syndication feed (RSS) because:
1. It’s part of a webpage, rather than an independent feed (though it can have an independent feed also)
2. It’s a single thing that updates, as opposed to a pipe that new things (such as blog posts) are coming down one after the other

This is how Microsoft describes WebSlices, a feature allowing Web sites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a Web page
“Developers can mark parts of webpages as ‘WebSlices’ and enable users to monitor information they rely on as they move about the web. With a click in the Favorites bar, users see rich ‘WebSlice’ visuals and developers establish a valuable, persistent end-user connection.”

Article on KillerSites…
“In a nutshell, webslices are an IE8 specific feature that allows the web designer to tag part of a webpage as a ‘webslice’. By tagging sections of a web page, users of IE8 can then subscribe to it, much in the same way that they can subscribe to an RSS feed.” Read full article here.

More reading available on: TechRepublic
If you are interested in creating WebSlices, read WebSlices – By Microsoft.pdf on how to do so and begin developing them today. Download the document from Box.Net widget available in the right side of this page.

IE8 – So What’s new?

Windows Internet Explorer 8 (commonly abbreviated IE8) is the next version of  Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer web browser, succeeding Internet Explorer 7. Beta 1, targeted for web designers and developers, was released to the general public on March 5, 2008. Microsoft released Beta 2, targeted for all consumers, on August 27, 2008. The final version is scheduled to be released soon.

According to Microsoft, security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, CSS, and Ajax support compared to IE7, are its priorities for IE8.

Internet Explorer 8 beta is intended to enable developers, web developers and IT pros to begin to test the new browser for compatibility with their applications and Web sites. End-user improvements include two new features: Activities and Web Slices. Activities are contextual services that allow easy access to Internet services from any Web page. WebSlices is a new feature for Web sites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a Web page. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Beta 2 is the second public pre-release of Internet Explorer 8 and adds Accelerators–which let you complete your everyday browsing activities more quickly and discover new services; InPrivate Browsing, search suggestions, and other new features.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download it from Microsoft. You can run it on XP and on both the 32- and 64-bit editions of Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. There are different downloads for each OS, so be sure you get the appropriate one.

10 Reasons to love (and hate)
#1: Faster is better
#2: Like a rock
#3: Crash recovery
#4: Browsing in private
#5: Tab grouping
#6: Accelerators and Web Slices
#7: Getting suggestive with search
#8: Security, security, security
#9: Where did those toolbars go?
#10: Standards break some sites
Visit TechRepublic’s Blog for full analysis. Also view Picture Gallery

Apart from above, there are some more features/integrations in IE8
These are:
Facebook Integration – Yes, seriously! With a Flock-like feature as an unexpected surprise, Microsoft capitalized on their partnership with the popular social networking site, Facebook, to allow IE8 users the ability to get status updates from Facebook right from their browser toolbar.

eBay Integration – Like Facebook, this feature also uses IE8’s new technology, called “WebSlices“, which introduces a new way to get updates from other sites via the browser itself, without having to visit the web site. With WebSlices, IE8 beta users can subscribe to portions of a page that update dynamically, in order to receive updates from that page as content changes. EBay will offer webslices, too, letting you track your auctions from the browser toolbar. Basically, WebSlices look like Favorites on your Links toolbar but they have a little arrow next to them – clicking on this arrow will show you a small window of live web content.

Live Maps Integration – Another WebSlice was integration with Live Maps. It appeared that you could even highlight text on a page, like an address, and then right-click and choose Live Maps from the context menu to get a WebSlice preview of that location on a map in a small pop-up window. How convenient!

Integration with Me.dium – Me.dium integration will be supported in IE8 via WebSlices. Me.dium will now help web surfers discover and view WebSlices directly from the sidebar. The Me.dium sidebar will alert users to the presence of WebSlices on any page – and even allows users to read each WebSlice, without leaving the Sidebar. In addition, Me.dium will make real-time recommendations for other WebSlices on other relevant web pages and provides direct links to them based on the real time activity of other Me.dium users.

Effective working with AJAX pages – IE8 will offer better functionality when it comes to AJAX web pages. The example showed a page where you could zoom in using AJAX technology. Previously, hit the IE “Back” button would take you back to the last page you were on. Now, “Back” will zoom you out.

Download Internet Explorer 8 (Beta) from Microsoft