It installed fine on Vista 32 Home Premium. Nothing really ground breaking....a list of the features (and some of my predominantly negative commentary):
Compatibility View
Internet Explorer 8 is a new release and some websites may not yet be ready for Internet Explorer 8. Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the
website as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. Per site basis.
- I geuss this is kinda useful...at least it means websites won't be breaking so much.
Enhanced Tabbed Browsing
Automatic Tab Grouping - tabs with similar content are grouped with the same colour.
I guess if your opening up 30/40 different tabs this is a problem...or if you have very small screen width that the name of the site is blocked out. Just for myself I don't see this as a useful new feature per se. I think firefox has something similar.
Better Find On Page
- Stolen from Firefox.
Smarter Address Bar
Can't remember the full address of a new website you visited last week? Type a few characters in the new Address Bar and Internet Explorer 8 will automatically recall sites you've already visited based on your entry. It searches across your History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds, displaying matches from the website address or any part of the URL.
- Firefox and Opera both have had this for a while. So stolen again.
Browse with InPrivate
Start InPrivate Browsing and your browsing activities, history and cookies are not retained, and third party web content providers may be hindered from tracking your online activities without your consent.
-Stolen from Chrome
Reopen closed tabs
Reopen a tab that you've closed in your current browsing session, which can be helpful when a tab is accidentally or prematurely closed.
- Opera definetly has this function..the undo function as I call it. Ctrl Z all the way
Reopen your last browsing session
Reopen all tabs that were open when Internet Explorer 8 was last closed, which can be useful if you accidentally close the browser.
I am not sure whether any browser has that.....I guess it wouldnt matter because most have an extensive history. Lots have recovery features if its closed by say the machine restarting, but not a whole sesion just like that.
Improved Zoom
Adaptive Page Zoom improves upon traditional zoom-in/zoom-out functionality in the browser by intelligently relaying out the page content and eliminating the need to scroll left and right.
- Useful I guess, but nothing special.
A better back button
When using rich applications such as mapping on the Internet, you may be taken to the beginning of the application instead of the previous page when you hit the back button. Now when you hit the back button, more pages will behave the way you expect.
- I always thought those sort of pages, such as filling out forms, could not be brought back because they all use the same address and just change the content within the page. Are Microsoft saying they can be brought back?
Enhanced Favorites Bar
Now there's a better place to keep track of your top favorites. You can save Favorites, RSS Feeds, and Web Slices to the Favorites bar that appears across the top of the browser, quickly navigating to the sites and content that you care about most.
- Opera steal!!
One Click Favorites
Press the One Click Add to Favorites bar button and immediately add the page you're browsing to the Favorites Bar, saving you extra clicks.
- Not sure if any other browser has this, but never found it that neccessary. You will only be adding favourites to taht personal bar occasionally...not all the time.
RSS feeds on Favorites bar
The Favorites bar has been updated so you can drag an RSS feed to your Favorites bar, making it easier to see when important feeds are updated.
- Ummm okayyy...
History sorting
The new Browsing History view allows you to sort your history by Site Name, Most Visited Sites, Order Visited Today, and Date, making it easier to organize and locate sites in your history.
- I thought even the old IE had this feature...I guess Most Visited is new....
History searching
In Internet Explorer 8, you can search for pages in history by typing keywords, making it easier to locate sites when browsing your history.
- Opera/Firefox steal.
Search suggestions
Have you ever forgotten the complete title of a book you were hoping to find or the first name of the actor in last night's movie? The new search capabilities in Internet Explorer 8 will offer relevant suggestions as you type words into the search box to help save time
-Lots of browsers have this, but I have never liked it much.
Visual search
Internet Explorer 8 is partnering with top search providers like Live Search, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, and more to deliver "visual search" images that provide you with immediate answers.
- I really don't like the way this is going in all the browsers. I don't want users to get reliant on searching for things through their browser like that. A simple piece of code, I am sure, could redirect you to a place where the searches all lead to other nasties. No sir...not for me. I don't want one toolbars with search engines and the like on my browser or that show me images. If they want to do that, then let the search engine provider do that, not the browser. (Can see it slowing browsing speed and showing images you just don't want to see).
Web Slices
Using Web Slices, you can keep up with frequently updated sites directly from the new Favorites Bar. If a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the browser.
When new information becomes available, the Web Slice will become highlighted. When you click on the Web Slice in the Favorites Bar, it previews relevant information. Clicking on the preview takes you directly to the site for more information.
- I dont know about this. I really don't. Every webslice you subscribe to, will surely be draining your connection in some way or the other. Or is there some simple text file in all websites that they can check to see if their is updated content? I can see if you have like 50 webslices your going to be draining your internet connection as it connects to each of these.....Its one thing to load up just the text from RSS feeds, but this will actually load the whole page in mini form.
Although I know many many people who will probably love this - I am just not one of them. It smells of laziness and it just takes one bad webslice I suspect, and you've suddenly got something loading **** onto your machine in that preview box.
Tab isolation
If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience.
- Chrome stealing...
Crash recovery
If one or more of your tabs unexpectedly closes or crashes, your tabs are automatically reloaded and you are returned to the site you were on before the crash.
- I think all the browsers have this now.
Smart Screen Filter
Internet Explorer 8 helps protect you against inadvertent installation of malware, or malicious software which can compromise your data, privacy, and identity while also damaging your computer and valuable data, with the new SmartScreen Filter.
If the SmartScreen Filter is active and you attempt to visit a website that isn't considered safe, the a promptl appears offering you to take alternative actions.
- An enhancment to my mind of their Phishing filter..not a bad idea. Though I do wonder if they are connecting to a Microsoft website each time you browse to confirm if the site is safe, or if they are doing like Firefox does and downloads a big 50Mb file that stores the names of all those websites which are dodgy.
Accelerators
How many steps does it take with your current browser to map an address, translate a word, or perform other routine tasks online? Until now it was likely a series of cutting and pasting information from one webpage to another. Now there's a better way. The new Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 help you quickly perform your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to obtain driving directions, translate and define words, email content to others, search with ease, and more.
- Seems like a Widget/Extension to me.....
For more on features:
http://www.microsoft...-...d=1&catid=1
All in all, its not a bad IE browser. Its actually quite good and fast. Its just that sooooo many of the good ideas are already stolen or already implemented in other browsers. Its like Microsoft haven't got anyone with the creativity to do these things themselves. Technically i am not faulting them, just the imagination or the common sense needed to think "what can I do to enhance a browser" - they just don't have that.
So you end up with a browser with a hell of a lot of good features, but all that have been implemented previously. Eg the Isolated Tab & Private browsing- an excellent idea but stolen from google. In that respect, Microsoft don't quite the Kudos from me...I still hold back on it. I guess by stealing from other people, they have taken the best of all the browsers and tried to make a browser with all those features in one.
The problem is though, there is no innovation really. Now I could be eating my words in a few months time when i discover some little known feature...but I will say one thing. If this is the browser that is going to be installed as Default on Operating systems from now on, the other Browsers better start making some serious improvements.
It seems like a safe, fast browser with lots of features. If I had not been using lots of other browsers for so long with their additional extra features such as speed dial, I could see no possible reason to change. (And that is a compliment!!).
You know what astounds me though? There best feature they didnt really name at all. I was like..wow.
The number one new feature for IE, isnt any of the above. To me its one of the simplest features of all...
The highlighting of the domain name.
Thats an amazing feature...now when you click on one of those really long fradulent links that has say Amazon or some such in it, you will be shown the Domain name in bold!!! Briliant idea so you can see straight off where your at.
No more, this looks like my banking website but I don't know...for instance an Amazon Phish (already been reported many times, so ignore the red alert factor!):
Notice how uncas is bolded up...making it very easy to tell thsi is a phishing website!!!
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Posted 19 March 2009 - 08:19 PM
