Pinoy Tech Guy

It’s nearly 3 months and as promised, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 to the public.  Beta 1 showed much promise but as the “beta” title implied, it was very rough around the edges and barely usable, unless of course you were a developer (since Beta 1 was dubbed as a developer-only release).  With a host of new (and old or even copied) privacy, stability, and privacy features, IE Beta 2 is an interesting enough of a release that it’s likely to turn heads.

And with good reason.

Setting up

After a mandatory (yeah, IE still needs that obligatory step) reboot, IE8 asks several routine questions on default browsers, search and accelerators (formerly known as Activities in Beta 1). Once done, it also asks you if you want to import your bookmarks and feeds into the browser from your currently installed ones (it detected Firefox 3 and Opera).

Once you’ve done all the required settings, you’re good to go and browse around.  The first thing you’ll notice is that they’ve dropped the highly noticeable Emulate IE7 button with this one you see on the right:

If you didn’t read any information about Beta 1, it uses “quirks mode” for pages that are missing proper HTML version information, and will default to its new “standards” mode for pages that include the information.

Whenever IE8 shows a page that’s using IE8’s true standards mode, an extra “broken page” button appears in the address bar. One click and it’ll refresh the tab to accommodate the settings.  Judging from how much better IE 8 renders sites (in Beta 2, not 1), I had to use the button only a few times.  Where you ask?  On Windows Live sites (Hotmail, Spaces).  Although when i checked them out again this morning some of the problem sites were fixed.  Hotmail in particular had the compatibility button gone from the toolbar.

Suggestions

I’ll start the list of new features with Suggestions and Accelators.

Suggestions are.. well suggestions.  It’s a list of suggested sites similar to what you are browsing, powered by Live Search of course, is shown in a little popup using IE8’s Web Slices technology.  As far as I can see it, it’s fairly accurate especially if your site is ranked quite well on SERPs.

Accelerators

Formerly know as activities, these are mini scripts or scriptlets that automate common tasks.  IE8 offers wider selection of third-party accelerators in five categories: blog, define, map, send/e-mail, and translate.  Interesting to see Google up on the list huh?

The IE Tabbing Experience

Tabbing was first (officially since a number of programs allowed you to “hack IE to add tabs”) brought to Internet Explorer via the release of IE7.  IE8 improves tabbing by adding several intuitive features like reopening tabs you’ve just closed and saving your open tabs into your session so you can reopen every tab that was open when you last quit the browser.

Microsoft added it’s touch with the new tab grouping feature.  Whenever you open a link within a tab to a new one, the current tab and the new tab will become colored to indicate that they are in a group.  Any tabs opened from either of them will fall under their tab group unless you specify otherwise, in which case, Tabs can be dragged between groups to regroup them, or ungrouped completely.

Without tab grouping

And with tab grouping:

Non-unique feature list starts here

Yep, taking cue from the success of other browsers. IE8 integrates several useful features that are included in modern browsers.. like say.. Mozilla Firefox 3. At the top of the list is a replica of Firefox’s Awesome Bar.

In page text search gets a much need overhaul.  Whenever you search, text within a web page highlights all matches simultaneously so it’s very easy to locate things.

Beta 2 also introduces a new “Caret mode” for keyboard-based browsing. When Caret Mode is enabled, a blinking indicator to show where the keyboard cursor is or a caret appears in the page and can be moved with the cursor and page navigation keys. Old school but it works for most people who get lost with browsing.

Now for all you privacy lovers, there’s an all new (in Internet Explorer at least) InPrivate Browsing mode.  Each InPrivate window has a clear indicator in the address bar, and the feature appears to work very much as advertised. Any activity performed within the InPrivate session is forgotten as soon as the window is closed.

Is it worth it?

Yep.  Beta 1 was very, very experimental and there was quite a lot of things that I didn’t like in terms of performance.  Now though, IE 8 feels like it’s getting it’s act back on track.  Although it won’t be able to catch up with the competition, it’s certainly given me quite an experience using it.  So much that I’ve resorted to make it my default IE version at home and work.  It’s not perfect but it’s certainly getting there.

A lot of features have been copied but they’re included to improve usability and as an overall package, IE8 is looking to be Microsoft’s best browser yet.

PS: IE8 Beta 2 has never crashed on me or at least not yet.  IE8 Beta 1 crashed the instant I closed one of my tabs =(

You can download Internet Explorer Beta 2 from the Microsoft Download Center.

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