Oddly enough, Microsoft is promoting the beta 2 version of IE8 on various websites on the net. After seeing the ad three times I couldn’t resist clicking for ‘a faster, better, more secure experience’ and ‘a web browser designed for the enterprise’. Let’s see what the hype is all about.
Installation
When I clicked the download button, I was really expecting a 80 MB download followed by half and hour of installation and a Windows reboot cycle; I had sort of a kamikaze feeling, not knowing if my machine will boot again normally.
But instead I was amazed to be looking at a 15.9MB self-extracting archive that installed in under 2 minutes and clicking Next only three times! This is a big improvement in my opinion, although it’s still twice as large as Firefox 3 at 7.1 MB.
Another noteworthy aspect is speed: both start-up and page load time have been, in my case, noticeably faster.
Features
If you’ve been keeping up with the development you’ll know most of the improvements listed here:
- Web Slices: parts of webpages that can be stored for quick access right in the toolbar; for example the upcoming stories for Digg.
- Suggested Sites: recommend you websites based on previously visited pages.
- Accelerator: apparently this manages to integrate different sources of information into one page – making searching things faster; I’m going to look further into this.
- InPrivate Browsing Mode: Similar to Safari’s ‘Private Browsing’ feature it prevents IE from storing history, cookies or other ‘tracks’.
- Google Gears and Windows Live Writer integration.
- Opera style overview of currently open tabs.
- Highlights the domain name in the address bar and prominently featured security certificates.
Conclusion
It’s not bad at all, and so far it hasn’t crashed or caused any problems. Worth the time for any Internet Explorer users. For the rest of us, who can’t get enough of the Firefox plugins – put your mouse down and continue browsing.
And a little fun fact, 3,26% of visitors to the Tux Geek use IE8, 8% Safari and 75% Firefox. Get IE8 here.
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