Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2: Review and Features

From the world’s most preferred web browser, here comes the new release: Internet Explorer 8. If you use Internet Explorer extensively but miss some of the features which other popular web browsers have, then this new release might provide you the solution. If you’ve already booked tickets to upgrade or switch on it, I would suggest you to give some more thought to this initiative.

The new features are pretty much handy and are introduced taking up in mind the need of the contemporary users. Most of them are a mere change in name of features. Some new features include changes like recovery of tabs tabs and sessions that have been closed accidentally or if they are closed due to crashing of the process, similar to what Firefox and Opera already have. The search function now offers an auto suggestion feature, similar to Firefox but can also show images within the search, provided it’s supported by the search engine. As a user types in the address bar, a list of suggestions drops down with relevant web sites from the browsing history, Favorites and RSS feeds, with the browser searching both URLs and page titles. Particularly this incremental test search feature was long overdue.

IE8 offers IN-PRIVATE browsing which prevents browser cookies, history and form data from being saved just like Opera which already has this option. Google’s Chrome too comes with this very feature. Mozilla’s add-ons were the driving forces towards IE‘s Accelerators. IE8 also supports caret browsing, yet another feature Firefox comes bundled with! The list goes on..

The expectations are high and IE8 is already creating a stir in the air, let’s have a quick review about the enhancements and add-ons featured within the new browser.

Web Slices:

With the help of web slice, user can subscribe to a portion of a Web page. It helps you to keep a record of your favorite websites, blogs and even web pages. When you add a web slice, IE8 will automatically integrate it into the Favorites Bar and you can check them later on with a single mouse click!

When some new information is available, the Web Slice gets highlighted. A click on the Web Slice in the Favorites bar provides relevant information. Digg, MSN Headlines, StumbleUpon, Ebay, etc web slices are currently available to install.

Accelerators are a group of functions which are deployed as contextual menu options that can quickly access applications or Web services from any Web page. Users can install from a wide variety of Accelerators from the Internet Explorer 8 Activity Gallery or through any Web site that advertises them. Accelerators make it easier to copy information from one Web page to another. Currently there are a variety of Accelerators available including: Find on Facebook, Define on Encarta, Find on Ebay, Yahoo Local Maps, et al.

Developer:

IE8 is especially designed to help developers and designers to prepare sites for it. The feature rich Developer’s tool offer enhanced support to view and edit the website’s source code , research, troubleshoot and resolve HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript-related problems.

This is a guest post by Praval who is a freelance writer/blogger and works for Uswaretech, a Django Consulting shop as Web Evangelist and Online Marketer.