I’m running Windows 7 right now on all of my machines so I don’t have the RTM version of IE8 but I figured that I should probably sort out what I’ve got. When I joined Microsoft I was fairly fastidious in my use of IE, but I confess that I had a bit of an on-off relationship with it and have used Firefox quite a bit.
Some of the use of FF has been convenience in having multiple browsers to manage multiple personas: so I use IE for work and FF for personal use (the reality is that I prefer Flock over Firefox as it is designed as more of a social workbench). It’d be great if any browser could have multiple personas: launch IE8 as <profile x> or launch IE8 as <Live ID> or whatever. I can lose track of who I am sometimes…
My other use is my perception of FF as having a bunch of useful add-ons that I find indispensible and can’t get elsewhere. I’ve dabbled with many add-ons but then I started to look at what I actually use: Blog this for Live Writer, Delicious, Foxmarks, FireFTP, Firebug and Sxipper.
So actually it turns out that I can do most of those in IE8. The exceptions are FTP (though I can do that elsewhere) and Sxipper (which I’d love to see on IE8).
Anyhoo, I headed off to the Addons site for IE8 and have added the following:
Search – A whole bunch of search providers such as Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, my own blog and so on. Pretty obvious.
Addons
Accelerators
Web Slices:
The jury is still out as to how useful the web slices will be on an ongoing basis, so I’m just experimenting with a couple.
I’ve also got Fiddler installed, and of course IE8 comes with developer tools already so need to add to those.
End result: I’m feeling surprisingly good about the notion that IE8 can do the job I want it to and some of the accelerators may actually accelerate the way I work with the web.