I’m never a big fan of BETA software because it is still under testing and can cause our computer to be unstable. However, when it comes to web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, I can’t wait to test the second BETA release. The reason why I only test second beta release and higher is because most likely the developers would have already fixed a lot of bugs that is found in the first BETA. So in the second beta, we can use the new features and it is also likely less buggy.
I just got to know that Internet Explorer 8 BETA 2 was released two days ago and I immediately went to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 website to download and install it on my computer. Testing IE8 on my computer for only 10 minutes and I can only say that IE8 is by far the best improvement that Internet Explorer has ever made.
Internet Explorer 8 is being developed around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
The first thing that I noticed about Internet Explorer 8 is it launches faster than Internet Explorer 7. One nice feature that Safari web browser already has is the IE8 InPrivate feature.
InPrivate Browsing prevents Internet Explorer from storing data about your browsing session. This includes cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and other data. The next time when I do online banking in Internet Explorer, I don’t need to manually delete the cache anymore… Firefox can support private browsing through Stealther add-on but unfortunately Opera doesn’t have this feature at all.
I also like the fact that it is no longer a hassle to reopen closed tabs. It can be done in IE7 but again it requires third party addons. After opening and closing a few web page through tabs, simply open a new empty tab will show you the tabs that you’ve closed since starting Internet Explorer 8. I guess this feature is a must since a lot of other browsers such as Firefox already has this.
The URL bar where you enter the website link is also improved and is now called Smart Address Bar. Typing in the Smart Address Bar not only searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds, but provides a great experience. You can easily delete any unwanted suggestions from the list by clicking the red “x” when you place your mouse cursor over an item.
If you frequently visit a website that is designed for older browsers, you can use the new IE8 built-in Compatibility View. Simply press the Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. It’s located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar. Actually I very seldom encounter problem displaying a webpage correctly on Internet Explorer as most websites are designed to be compatible with IE.
Then there are other top features like Web Slices which keep up with changes to the sites you care about most, Accelerators that let you complete your everyday browsing activities more quickly and even discover new services and SmartScreen Filter which is a new security feature that helps to protect you against deceptive and malicious websites which can compromise your data, privacy, and identity.
One problem I noticed about Internet Explorer 8 is it takes up a lot of memory. If I open 4 tabs, it actually launches 4 iexplore.exe processes and took up a total of 141MB! Unlike Internet Explorer 7, opening 4 tabs only launches 1 iexplorer.exe process and takes up only 64MB. Let’s hope the developer of IE8 realizes this and will improve on the memory usage. Oh and finally you can install IE8 on pirated Windows because the installer doesn’t validate if your Windows is genuine or not. I believe this is to encourage more users to use Internet Explorer.