It was announced some time ago and right on time the IE team released the second beta of Internet Explorer 8.
You can read the details in the official team post, but I would like to highlight what I think are the most significant features of this beta.
1. Compatibility View
There has been a lot of talk abut the fact that IE8 now runs by default in “standards mode” which is a mode more compliant to web standards than any previous version of IE however, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended.
IE 8 Beta 1 included a “Compatibility mode” to allow browsing sites that would not work in IE8. Unfortunately switching this on and off required to restart the browser which was quite inconvenient. In IE8 happens on the fly without a browser restart and is domain specific (which means that if you set compatibility when visiting a domain, IE8 will remember that setting when you go there again).
You can find more about this here and if you are web developer make sure you read the post to ensure your site does now break when a visitor uses IE8!
2. Reliability
I have seen a demo of IE8 crashing and… only the affected tab required restarting and… it would do it automagically!!!
This is made possible by a feature called Loosely-Coupled IE (“LCIE”), which is an architectural attribute that helps isolate different parts of the browser from each other, most notably, the frames from the tabs. For more info check this post.
3. Tabs
The tabbed browsing experience is greatly improved in IE8. For starter once you open a new tab you are presented with a much more meaningful page that provides a series of useful options:
The tabs themselves are grouped and colored based on the page they are originating from (when you CTRL+click a link for example):
And by the way… you can resume the tabs closed since starting IE8 and reopen the last browsing session too!!
4. Visual search
When you do a search in the search field, you are presented with a drop down which shows rich search results (if the search engine supports this, try out Visual Search from the New York Times, Wikipedia, Amazon, or eBay).
5. Privacy
There has been a lot of talking about InPrivate Browsing.
This feature has been dubbed “porn mode” by many bloggers here, here, here. The best comment I read about this was from an guy who wrote “Porn mode? I don’t need a porn mode, my browser is always in porn mode”. And if you have seen the AvenueQ musical… you would know that The Internet is for Porn.
Anyway, while I find this “denomination” quite fascinating, the fact of the matter is that privacy while browsing is often a major concern for users and you can find more info in this post.
In a nutshell, while InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:
- New cookies are not stored
- All new cookies become “session” cookies
- Existing cookies can still be read
- The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
- New history entries will not be recorded
- New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
- Form data is not stored
- Passwords are not stored
- Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
- Queries entered into the search box are not stored
- Visited links will not be stored
It is also possible to preserve favorite website data when deleting browsing history and cookies (useful when you want to get rid of all those nice little tracing cookies you collected in days and weeks of browsing but not to delete all the stored passwords for the websites you use regularly).
I could go on for pages and pages… I definitely recommend to read the IE team blog to find all sorts of info about the new IE8, I really think they did a great work on this release.
