Ten tweaks to love (and hate) in IE8

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.

Figure A: You can easily recover closed tabs or the entire previous browsing session

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…