Internet Explorer 8

In My Humble Opinion
1

Did a search and didn’t see any recent threads on it yet, so here we go.

Internet Explorer 8 beta went public today from microsoft.com. I installed, and so far, I like.

For a dry summary, check Wikipedia.

There’s a new “InPrivacy” feature which, from what I can tell, doesn’t keep a history, cache, or cookies on that session. You can turn it on or off as you browse. Some call it “porn mode,” and it makes sense–basically, when you browse in InPrivacy, it keeps no history that your browsing session ever happened. If I’m oversimplifying, I apologize, but that’s what I can tell.

The Accelerators feature seems cool, I’ve used it a few times tonight and seems to work as designed. Haven’t played with WebSlices yet, but Wiki says it’s basically the same thing as the old Active Desktop feature.

Various sites tout MS’ increasing compliance with HTML and CSS standards. For websites built around MS’ previous quick fixes, there are multiple compatibility modes-- you can render a page as it would look in IE7, for example.

The address bar is changed up a bit; domain names are highlighted in bold by default to increase user awareness.

And my favorite change… grouped tabbing. If you spawn a tab from a site, it’s color coded. Very nice when you have 4 SDMB tabs open, 3 from another site, 4 from another, etc.

ETA: Just noticed there’s also a “Recently Closed Tabs” menu. Very cool for me, since I have a bad habit of closing tabs accidently.

Speaking of tabbing, it seems that MS has fixed the “when content in one tab causes a crash, the entire browser crashes” problem. When content in one tab causes a crash now, only that tab crashes, and you don’t lose your whole browsing session. Works good so far, but I’m sure there’s something that will pop up and crash the whole thing at some point.

So that’s that. A few hours in, and it’s actually noticably different from IE7, though in subtle ways. Pages seem to load faster, but I haven’t determined if that’s actually happening or not, yet.

So, anyone else playing with the IE8 public beta yet? Thoughts?

2

I switched off IE in 2000 or 2001ish. Now they’ve come a long way and if they would just make it more customizable I would consider switching back. I’m getting dead sick of Opera’s instability, incompatibility, and insatiable appetite for memory. Actually I’ve been dead sick of it for a few years; I don’t know why I stay so loyal to this browser. Glutton for punishment, I guess. Or because its unique features are sooooo much better and more convenient than other browsers . . .

3

Just FYI (since I never seem to see anyone using it), Firefox has had an add-on that does this for ages.

4

Eh. I never got into Firefox. It was rather slow and clunky on my machine; each page seemed to lock everything up for a good 5 seconds after it loaded.

5

I just got it. It does seem faster.