Internet Explorer 8 is finally here and you can download it here. The improved IE8 markets itself as having a faster browsing speed then IE7, accelerators, InPrivate Browsing, Web Slices, Search Suggestions and SmartScreen Filter.
Here comes the user experience part. I’m no big fan of Internet Explorer and has always been using Opera, Firefox or Chrome if given the choice. Web Slices and accelarators are perhaps the only thing that makes IE8 unqiue. So called InPrivate Browsing, Search Suggestions and SmartScreen Filter feaures can already be found in Opera, Chrome and Firefox, with different namings of course.
The biggest improvement I can see is that IE8 can now restore crashed tabs. One of the thing that makes older versions of IE so frustrating to use was that it’s slow, hangs up and crashes often on slower machines, without giving users the chance to reopen whatever they were reading before the crash. Unlike Opera and Firefox which already had the feature of restoring closed/crashed tabs ages ago, at least this much needed feature is finally here in IE8.
For web developers, the IE Developer toolbar (Tools > Developer Tools or F12) has also improved. But Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar extensions for Firefox are still the best tools for web development IMHO.
The IE team has also recently reported that IE8 uses up 90% less memory than IE7 after running continuously for 24 hours under Long Haul testing. Only time will tell now whether that holds true. More users will get to try out the new IE8 as it’s push through to all windows users through Microsoft Windows Update.
Nice beginner article on IE8. See: http://bit.ly/vJKbW
For readers who use Firefox and IE8, I wanted your readers to be aware that Firefox has a version of Accelerators too, it is called “KALLOUT – Accelerators for Firefox” It’s available as a free add-on through Firefox. See: http://bit.ly/vJKbW
I believe the accelerators from IE8 will actually work directly with KallOut-Accelerators for Firefox so users can stick with Firefox if they want and still get the benefits of the community-developed accelerators.
EL
Thanks for sharing, EL. I’ll try the extension and compare it with what IE8 has built in.
Kallout is NOT Firefox’s version of Accelerators. It was developed by a third party company and is not endorsed by Firefox. You should be clear about that before spamming any story that mentions “accelerators”.
Hi
I am using IE8.0 since 1 month. Suddenly my systems hangs when I open the developer toolbar from IE8 and then I can’t do anything I should have to forcibly restrart my system to work further. But if I do the same thing again, I have the same situation.
Does any one has the same kind of problem. Please share.
Thanks in advance.