In March I wrote a post titled IE8: The Bad, since then a new beta of Internet Explorer has been released. It still seems a bit dubious whether they are actually committing to standards. This could be a communication issue or actually intended. It is mostly unclear to me.

XDomainRequest : Microsoft unfortunately continues with XDomainRequest rather than making changes to XMLHttpRequest as other browsers are doing and as is being standardized by the W3C Web Apps Working Group. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of XMLHttpRequest Level 2.) Some agreement was made to at least support the same protocol on the server, namely using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header as per Access Control for Cross-Site Requests. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of that draft too.) However, IE8 only supports * as value for that header, not an origin, e.g. http://annevankesteren.nl (test). Sunava pointed out that was because the W3C WebApps WG was still debating the matter. Here is hoping they will fix the bug as there is agreement on that syntax.

HTML5 DOM Storage: localStorage and sessionStorage are now supported. Enumerating through them does not give the results I was expecting (I got " length " and " remainingSpace " back as well, besides the keys) and they still have a remainingSpace member that is not part of HTML5. Given that anything that gives some indication of space is highly vendor specific as it depends on encoding, compression, and type of device, they should really rename it to msRemainingSpace or some such or simply drop it. IE8 also supports an event named storagecommit that is not part of HTML5 which tells you when the data has been written to an XML backend format IE8 uses. The event object for used for the storage does not expose key , oldValue , and newValue . The url member is named uri and the source member is null rather than a reference to the Window object. Ouch!