We heard the good reviews of this new version of IE, and we also saw bad words of it as well, just like all other new things. Unless you try it out yourself you can never tell who is right and who is wrong, or they could be all wrong. So I went ahead and downloaded the package and installed on my laptop.
After using it for a while, I already found myself like it quite a bit. The layout is pretty much the same as the previous version, including the logo, but they added a few nice neat features on it that I found quite useful and user-friendly.
Address Bar
The suggested site has built in by default but you can turn it off if you don’t like it. It also grades out the sub-domains and folders in the url so the domain name stands a little bit out. Google Chrome already has this feature built in but FF hasn’t yet.
Add favorites right to the favorites toolbar
It’s quite useful having this little thing right next to the Favorites Star button so that I can add bookmarks right to the toolbar, instead having to go through a couple of more steps in the previous version.
Tabs are now grouped nicely in colors
That’s extremely helpful when you have a lot of tabs opened in your browser because then you can easily identify them where they come from and what they are related to. Nice thought and done, IE team.
The compatibility view helps
It helps reverse the browser back to the previous engine so 1) it helps when visiting the sites that aren’t compatible with the new version; and 2) it helps web developers to test their sites on two versions of browsers from one computer. It’s the button next to refresh button.
Accelerators do accelerate the browsing performance
When you select any text in the web page, a little blue arrow box pops up from which you can select numbers of choices to do a quick preview. It’s called accelerator, a little neat new feature added in this version that should be quite helpful in some cases.
Those are the quite obvious ones I discovered on this new version of IE. Digging deeper, the performance and the speed are quite impressively improved as well, compare to the previous version. In my own case, it’s definitely faster than Firefox, and pretty the same as Google Chrome, but that could be because I have quite a bit add-ons installed on Firefox that slows it down. It’s also quite industry standard compliant. Most of the sites I tested show the exact same result as from both Firefox and Google Chrome.
Overall, it’s a good and must-have upgrade. I will certainly use it more often than before. Nice work, IE team.
hi.. this is really very useful and helpful post. i like it. thanks for sharing keep it on.
i am a firefox user more than an internet explorer user but it seems that Internet explorer 8 is very stable and it its loading time for webpages is faster too.