Internet Explorer 8
Yah! Today they’ve sent around some internal memos about the release of the beta file of IE8. While we’ve been playing with the Beta 2 already for a little while here, (and showed some of the features to the bloggers present on our latest event) I’m really happy about the progress that’s been made so far. And so, the IE8 B2 has been released for public browsing pleasure somewhere around 6 AM this morning. The supported languages so far are English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, and the next update will follow with another 21 languages in mid-September. You can download IE8 Beta 2 now at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.
The bottom line is that IE8 is faster, easier and safer. To get a feel for the new IE8 experience, check out the videos here, download the product, and try it out. These are a few of the cool features:
- Accelerators - Highlight an address, click the blue button and hover over “Map” or try Right Clicking a Page and Choosing Translate with Windows Live. Check out the new IE Gallery that has cool accelerators and slices from Digg to FaceBook to Ebay
- Web Slices - Visit Live Search, search for “Seattle Weather” (or major city relevant to your region), hover over the rich search result and click the green button. Click it to add a Weather Web Slice to your Favorites Bar.
- Search Suggestions - Go to your Instant Search Box (top right) and type a search to see search suggestions in action.
- Navigation - Use the new Smart Address Bar to quickly find sites you’ve visited before. The Smart Address Bar searches your history, favorites AND feeds for pages that match what you’re typing.
- Security: IE8 has the best security features in the market today from its updated Smartscreen phishing and malware filter to domain highlighting to the industry leading cross-site scripting filter so I feel my machines, my identity and my family will be safer on the Internet
There’s bunch of pretty funny virals that have been released on the innernets to promote the IE8 launch. One of my favorites is the one about the slices:
One other really cool thing to check out is the Internet Explorer Gallery, an archive of cool and useful addons, web slices and accelerators. Definitely worth a check if you want to pimp your browser a bit.
So what are the main differences with IE7 and, for instance FireFox3?
- Out-of-the box integrated Accelerators put your favorite blog, mapping, mail, search and other services a click-away
- Built-in Privacy mode keeping you in control of what information you share and with whom, both on your PC and on the web
- Rich visual search results and instant answers from partners like Wikipedia, New York Times, and Amazon
- Intuitive tab grouping and color coding to mirror the way you browse and help organize your browsing experience
- Automatic tab-level crash recovery for uninterrupted browsing
Righty. So the only thing left for you to do is go download and experience it yourself. One thing to note: because not all sites are IE8 compatible yet, keep in mind there is a IE7 compatibility button just on the right next to the address bar. You can even add the sites you visit regularly to a list so IE8 remembers to open them in compatibility mode straight away until they’ve updated. Have fun!
August 30th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Tab grouping and color coding is great. It is also possible in Firefox through an addon but it’s a bit buggy and it has a hard time catching up with new versions of Firefox. Great to see Microsoft offers this by default!
I really would like to download IE8, but as web designer/developer I still need IE7 and even IE6 to test sites for compatibility. I wish there was an easy solution running those browsers next to each other.