Top 5 New Tweaks in Internet Explorer 8
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Internet Explorer 8
Ready for IE8?
Microsoft’s latest browser upgrade, Internet Explorer 8, is here. The official market release schedule is 4PM GMT on Thursday, 19th March. However, a release candidate has already been made available to the public since January, allowing people to download, install, and play around with the new browser.
I myself have not tried it, as I have been a long-time Firefox user (with occasional forages into Google Chrome). I had abandoned Internet Explorer since IE6. I have IE7 installed but have never felt like actually using it. But this newest offering from Microsoft has me curious, especially with the promise of a faster, safer, and more enhanced browsing experience.
On that note, here are 5 features of IE8 that have caught my interest.
1. InPrivate Browsing – this new IE8 feature lets you browse without retaining any info regarding your activities. That includes website visits, search history, usernames, passwords, form data, cookies, and temporary Internet files. This is great when browsing at a cafe or other public computer. Microsoft has also taken parental control into consideration by giving the option to disable the InPrivate feature.
2. Compatibility View – IE8 renders webpages using the latest Web standards, so pages designed for older browsers will not display properly. Microsoft has thought this out, however, and offers a toolbar button that you can click to display the affected webpage as one would view it on IE7. Pretty considerate, I’d say.
3. Tab Groups - now this is interesting to me, who absolutely loves to open links in new tabs. IE8 not only groups tabs with related content, but color-codes them for easy reference. One look and you know at once which tabs have related content. Right-clicking on a group gives you options like closing a tab or the whole group.
Tab Groups
4. Automatic Crash Recovery – what sounds really promising about this is the fact that IE8 isolates the affected tab, meaning when a webpage crashes, the other pages you have open in other tabs remain safe and the browser itself stays stable. Convenient, isn’t it? Tabs are also automatically reloaded after crashing.
5. Web Slices and Accelerators - two handy little add-ons, Web Slices lets you check updates like weather, stock, or traffic news right from your Favorites Bar, without having to visit the actual site. You can highlight any text on a page and use Accelerators to find translations and definitions, do a related search, and other tasks directly from that page.
With these, I might just give IE8 a try. Who knows, I might actually fall in love with it. How about you?
You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 at Microsoft’s official IE page.
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i love Internet Explorer 8 because it is so much stable that the previous versions of IE. IE7 sometimes freezes and causes blue screens on my PC -
Internet Explorer 8 is really good. This browser is very very stable and i have been using it for quite a while without blue screens or crashes.