26 Sep 2008 14:44
Microsoft recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 to the public.
Although it's still a beta, this version is said to be feature-complete. Many users have downloaded it, and reviews, as usual, have been mixed.
If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download it from Microsoft's website. 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 operating system, so be sure to get the appropriate one.
In my opinion, Microsoft did a good, but not perfect, job with this offering. Here are some of the characteristics of the new browser that I like and others that aren't so pleasing.
1. Faster is better
In the computer world, we never seem to get past the need for speed.
We want faster connections, faster hardware and faster software.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is noticeably faster than IE7 on most websites. Pages 'pop' in a way that I never saw with its predecessor, but did see in Firefox.
Pages with JavaScript or Ajax load much faster, thanks to the improved script engine. This increased performance is likely to be one of the features that's most noticeable, and most useful, to users.
2. Like a rock
Stability is at least as important as speed. IE7 never was stable.
On occasion, usually at least a couple of times per day, it would just stop responding for no apparent reason — try to click a link, try the back button or even try to close the browser normally, and you got nothing.
When that happened, I would have to open Task Manager and kill it there. This happened on both XP and Vista machines, and many others have told me that it happened to them, too. I knew plenty of users who went back to IE6 for that reason, but I wasn't willing to give up my tabs.
I've been using IE8 for many hours a day now for over a week and not once has it crashed. If a site or add-on does cause a crash in IE8, it's designed so that only that one tab goes down, instead of taking the entire browser down with it.
3. Crash recovery
Yes, I know Firefox already had it. That's one of the reasons my loyalty has been divided between IE7 and Firefox ever since I installed the former.
Now IE8 has it, too: the ability to recover your last browsing session in case the browser does crash, or even if you just accidentally close it yourself.
I don't know how many times I've cursed IE7 when I was in the middle of some complex research and had half a dozen tabs open that I had come to through all sorts of routes, and the browser decided to go down, taking all my tabs. Sometimes it was my own fault: I was doing 10 things at once, had three or four separate browser windows open, and closed the wrong one.
What a pain it was to try to find those pages again. Now you just open a new tab and click the Reopen Last Browsing Session link, as shown in Figure A.
The new page also has links for every tab you've closed during the session, so you can get them back if you close only one tab accidentally. This feature will save many users much grief or keep them from having to switch to Firefox, as I did, when doing anything important or complicated on the web.
4. Browsing in private
Much attention has been paid to the new InPrivate Browsing feature in IE8, with some calling it 'porn mode' because it allows you to cover your tracks by preventing browsing history and cache files from being retained.
There are, however, other, legitimate reasons to use the InPrivate feature. It also prevents the computer from retaining your usernames and passwords, and from…
…retaining information you type into web forms, as well as preventing cookies from being stored on your system.
It's not a feature I expect to use much, but it would certainly be useful when using public computers or those shared with co-workers or family members under certain circumstances (for instance, when buying a surprise birthday gift for your spouse).
The feature is off by default. To turn it on, you just open a new tab and click the Start InPrivate Browsing link, which can also be seen in Figure A.
5. Tab grouping
Microsoft may be accused of copying some of IE8's new features, such as crash recovery, from Firefox. Google's Chrome browser, released in beta just a few days after the IE8 Beta 2 release, has a similar private-browsing feature — Incognito.
However, IE8 has one new feature — colour-coded tab grouping — that, as far as I can tell, is all its own, although I won't be surprised if others copy it in the future.
Colour-coded tab grouping lets you see at a glance which tabs have been opened from links within other tabs, because all the related tabs are the same colour. This is actually more useful than it sounds, and can be seen in Figure B.
When you right-click a tab, you have the options to close that tab, close the entire group or remove the tab from the group.
6. Accelerators and web slices
Accelerators (called 'activities' in the earlier betas) are little add-ins that make it quick and easy to apply a task to highlighted text.
For example, you can select a paragraph within a web page and translate it to another language without having to copy it and go to a translation site and paste it in. Or you can highlight a word and define it using a variety of sources, such as Encarta, Dictionary.com or Wikipedia. Or you can highlight an address or geographic location (city, state or country) on a web page and get a map directly on that page, without having to go to a mapping website.
The accelerators that you've installed appear in the context menu when you highlight text on a page and right click it, as shown in Figure C.
Figure D shows what happens when you highlight the word 'Afghanistan' and select the 'Map with Live Maps' accelerator.
A large number of accelerators are available. You can download them from the Internet Explorer Gallery.
Web slices are like RSS feeds, in that they let you subscribe to content so that you're updated when it changes. With the slices, however, you don't have to subscribe to an entire page; there can be different slices within a page.
Your selected slices are added to the Favourites bar and, when new information becomes available, the web slice will be highlighted. You simply click the slice in the Favourites bar to get a preview of the updated content; clicking on that will take you to the site itself.
7. Getting suggestive with search
IE8 attempts to make it easier to find what you're looking for by offering suggestions along the way.
When you type a search term, you can see suggestions that are based on your own browsing history and your chosen search provider. For instance, typing just a few letters brings up suggestions that may be relevant to your search, as shown in Figure E.
It's also easier to find specific information on a web page with IE8. When you select Find On This Page from the Edit menu or press Ctrl + F, a toolbar appears below the row of tabs. This is a welcome change from the Find dialogue box that would pop up in IE7 and obscure part of the web page.
The Find function searches as you type, and highlights…
…the matches in yellow, as shown in Figure F.
The address bar is smarter now, too. You can type a search term there instead of in the Search box, and you'll see suggestions of sites that pertain to the text you typed, based on your browsing history, as shown in Figure G.
8. Security, security, security
Security is on all our minds these days, and IE8 adds a number of security enhancements. The good news is that it has done so without making security 'in your face' — a common complaint about Windows Vista's enhanced security.
New security features include:
For more information about IE8 security enhancements, see the series of posts to the IEBlog on the MSDN site.
9. Where did those toolbars go?
Some new IE8 users have complained that their Links bar disappeared after installation. Actually, it gets a new name: now it's part of the Suggested Sites bar. It retains the links you had on your Links bar in IE7.
If you open a second instance of IE8, you may not see the links by default. You can grab the edge of the Suggested Sites bar and move it up or down to a new line, and it will expand so you can see your links again. This is a slight annoyance, although it's far outweighed by the improvements in IE8.
Another thing that I've heard several users complain about is the fact that, when they installed IE8, it disabled their Google Toolbar. In fact, a few told me that they rolled back to IE7 solely because of that.
I haven't used the Google Toolbar much with IE7 because it added the built-in search bar, where you can select Google as your search provider if you want. However, some users miss other features of the Google Toolbar, such as the ability to save Toolbar settings online and access them from any computer.
In the earlier beta of IE8, the Google Toolbar caused frequent crashes. This is probably the reason that Microsoft disabled it by default in Beta 2. It does not remove it, however, and you can re-enable it by clicking Toolbars in the View menu and checking Google Toolbar.
When I've done so as an experiment, it has functioned without problems, but be aware that it may cause instability.
10. Standards break some sites
For many years, Microsoft has been criticised for not adhering to web standards established by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which creates specifications and standards for the web) in previous versions of IE. Opera even filed a lawsuit asking the European Commission to force Microsoft to follow the standards.
By default, IE8 complies with all established standards. Ironically, this causes some websites (those that were designed for IE6 and IE7) to display improperly in IE8. For instance, some content may not show up or things may be misaligned.
However, Microsoft anticipated this and included a Compatibility button. Its icon, appropriately enough, is a representation of a broken page, and it appears at the right end of the address bar along with the Refresh and Stop icons, as shown in Figure H.
If a page doesn't render correctly, you can click this button, and IE8 will go into compatibility mode and behave like IE6 or IE7, so the page will appear correctly.
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