Microsoft released Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta last week. I was relunctant to download it and give it a try because of chance of instability not just to web browser but the entire OS, or operating system as a whole. But my curiosity won and I installed it today and writing this review using it.
The first thing I noticed was the Favorites is now part of the top section of the browser where the common File, Edit View etc bar and the navigation buttons are. I found it somewhat pointless if I have more bookmarks that the width of the browser can display because in that case I STILL have to either click the double arrow to the far right of the Favorites or click the Favorites in the File, Edit and View bar like in previous versions. Needless to say, I got rid of that right away, although a Favorites button remains on the top, it still takes up less space than before as I prefer a cleaner browser with as little as possible. Another related feature is the One Click Favorites which will save you a few clicks when trying to favorite a page.
IE7 introduced tab navigations which was long implemented in Firefox and Mozilla, IE8 further enhances that feature with Quick Tabs where you will be able to view thumbnail size of pages in each tab. You can go to that page by selecting the corresponding thumbnail.
On the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 features page, it stated Increased performance. I have yet to notice any differences, and I actually crashed while surfing other websites once. I’m not sure if its a coincidence or because of IE 8.
There are two features that I think are relatively more useful – Web Slices and Compatibility View. Web Slices allows you to “favorite” or subscribe to a web page in your Favorites. When new information is available, the tab will be highlighted, when you click on the tab, it will then display a preview of the updated page. Clicking on that preview will bring you to the actual page. This is very handy for people that often buy/sell on eBay. The compatibility View is also a great feature because I can assure you not every website will be fully compatible with this new version of IE. WordPress for one isn’t 100% compatible. With this new feature, all you have to do is click theCompatibility View button located just beside the Refresh and Stop button on the url section and you can view the page, and only this page, as if you are using IE7.
The URL bar, where you type in a website address also received enhancements. For example, if I type in the word “game”, it will display all matches from History, Favorites and RSS feeds. Neat feature but probably not as useful as the previous two mentioned.
Finally, IE8 also introduces a feature called Accelerators. Basically the idea is to save user’s time by eliminating the copying and pasting. It is sort of like an auto complete by using stored input data. I haven’t had time to play around too much with it.
I have also found a bug that will crash IE8 everytime, at least on my PC. Simply right click on any links and it will crash. Although IE can recover and display the page again. Basically I cannot right click on any links until either I downgrade back to IE7 or wait for an updated version of IE8.
There are some nice features in this version of IE but nothing “must get”. So for those who are not as curious as me, its better to wait for the “live” release. I have not written all the features of IE8 but rather some of the obvious ones but I hope this review can give you some ideas of what is to expect from IE8. For an overview or the full list click here.
