Instructify

Back in 2003 and 2004, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had between 91% and 96% of the browser market. This number has been shrinking slowly since 2004 when Mozilla’s Firefox was introduced. According to Wikipedia, as of February 2009, Internet Explorer had 67.5% of the market share and Firefox came in at number two with almost 22%. Microsoft, with their latest iteration of their browser, hopes to turn this downward trend around.

I’ve been playing with IE8 since the final version was released last Thursday. It’s fast — lightning fast. In fact, in many of the speed tests conducted by various outlets, IE8 outperformed its browser counterparts. It’s definitely much faster than Internet Explorer 7.

There are many slick features in this latest version worth checking out. Microsoft has implemented Firefox’s idea of a “smart location bar,” which automatically searches through your browser history as you’re typing an address — great for those of us who have visited a page but can only remember a portion of the URL. They’ve also implemented the feature that restores your tabs if your browser crashes, which was sorely missed in IE7. A nice feature with IE8′s tabbed browsing is that each tab is it’s own process, similar to Google Chrome, so if a site crashes on a particular tab, the entire browser will not die on you. Simply close the bad tab and continue browsing. IE8 also does a great job of grouping tabs. When you open a new tab from a particular page, the tabs will change color and Internet Explorer 8 will automatically “group” these tabs by color. This is a handy feature for those of us that like to have many tabs open at a single time.

Microsoft beat Mozilla to the punch with “InPrivate” or anonymous browsing, which will delete any tracks of your web journey when you step back into “normal” mode. Another very interesting and neat, albeit somewhat confusing feature is Internet Explorer 8′s new “Accelerator” feature. Accelerator allows you to select any text on a page, then easily perform everyday web browsing tasks such as mapping or searches without navigating to other websites to get things done. For example, you could highlight an address on a web page, use the “Map with Live Maps” accelerator, then view a map of that address directly on the web page you’re currently viewing. Pretty neat.

Internet Explorer 8 has a ton of great features and is very, very quick, but none of this matters if it cannot display a web page correctly. Once of the very first pages I visited with IE8 was The Whirlwind, my school’s online newspaper. Although the page displays properly in every other web browser according to BrowserShots, a web utility that allows you to see screen shots of any web page in multiple browsers, the site displayed incorrectly in this newest version of Internet Explorer, yet displays just fine in Internet Explorer 7 and dozens of other web browsers. Things are supposed to get better not worse, aren’t they?

Overall, I was very impressed with the speed and additional features Internet Explorer 8 has to offer, but until they figure out a way to display web pages correctly or finally decide to comply with web standards their slowly diminishing share in the browser market will, most likely, continue to decline.

Final Word: IE8 does a good job of implementing many features that are already available in Firefox, either by default or with a plug-in. The “Accelerator” feature is worth checking out and if you have things to hide or are concerned about privacy, “InPrivate” browsing is a must have. I’m a Firefox user and have been for quite some time. Internet Explorer 8 did not impress me enough to make the switch back to IE, but if you are an Internet Explorer user, it would be worth your time to check it out. – JERRY SWIATEK

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

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