Microsoft still leads the browser market, but stiff competition from FireFox, Opera, and others means the software giant can't rest on its laurels. This explains the release of Internet Explorer 8. How well does this feature-packed browser actually work? I decided to take it on a test run.
Contributed by Terri Wells Rating: / 2 May 14, 2009
Just because I was feeling a little perverse, I tried to download IE 8 with FireFox 3. As near as I can tell, it's doable, but the directions given by Microsoft clearly assume that you're going to use a version of Internet Explorer. Not feeling quite that experimental, I changed my mind and chose to use IE 7. My reference system is a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop running Windows Vista.
It's worth noting here that Microsoft can detect details of your system if you try to download IE 8 using IE 7, but apparently can't do that if you try to download it with FireFox. Let me show you what I mean. This is what I saw when I hit the IE 8 home page in IE 7:
And this is what I saw when I used FireFox:
It's not a huge difference, of course. When I clicked on the button with FireFox, the next page asked me to choose my country and operating system from two drop-down menus. So far, it looks like IE 8 is only available for Windows-based systems. Thankfully, it is available for Windows XP – so if I like it enough on my laptop, my desktop won't need to feel left out.
Downloading Internet Explorer 8 was a simple matter of hitting the download button and pressing “run.” In Vista, I was asked to grant approval before the wizard came on the screen. Veteran Microsoft users will not be surprised that the wizard told me that “Before you begin, we recommend that you save your files and close all programs.” Additionally, I would have to restart my computer once setup was completed.
The first step after starting the wizard involved accepting the “Microsoft Software Supplemental Licensing Agreement.” This wasn't nearly as bad as other licensing agreements I've seen, especially from Microsoft. It's shorter and more readable, as if the company made an extra effort to be understood.
And it's no wonder. The agreement includes a statement that informs you that some of the browser's features call the mother ship. Those features can be turned off or not used, but “By using these features you consent to the transmission of the information.” That last statement is in bold in the agreement. I'm glad the company is being this clear about that point. Incidentally, using the accelerators may pass some information on to the accelerator provider; likewise, when you use the Search Suggestions feature, some information may be passed on to the search provider.
Once I finished downloading I got this screen:
So IE installed without the latest Windows updates, and for that, I'd have to restart the computer, open IE, click the Tools button, and then click Windows Update. No big deal, but for some reason, as soon as I hit the restart button, my computer started downloading and configuring updates. I went through the update procedure described anyway.
I found one that needed installing...and it proceeded to take forever to install. Up to this point it had taken maybe 10 minutes, if that long, but for some reason, Microsoft was installing .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and something else related to the .NET Framework. I honestly don't know why I needed this update.
I saw differences between IE 7 and IE 8 right away, even though they were subtle. There are new icons and controls at the top of my browser. So let's start at the very top and work our way down.
This image was taken from the right side of the address bar. That little icon that looks like a ripped piece of paper lets you activate Compatibility View. As the tool tip explains, this lets you view websites that look “broken” in IE 8 because they were designed for older versions of IE. Interestingly enough, when I clicked it while the browser was pointing to Google, instead of getting an ad for the Google toolbar in the upper right hand corner, I got an ad for Google Chrome.
When you activate Compatibility View, by the way, you get a little balloon that tells you the site you're viewing is now running in Compatibility View. And it does this every time you switch to it. If there are certain pages you will want to always see only in Compatibility View, you can set this up under Tools (more about that in the next part).
I was pleased to see from my initial checks that ASP Free doesn't look any different in either view. No doubt our programmers will be glad to hear this as well. One of our CMSes, however, DID look different in IE 8 – different enough to make working in it difficult. Switching to Compatibility View solved the problem. If you use a CMS to which you connect via the Internet, you may want to keep this in mind, especially if the CMS has been customized at all.
The Google search box is different. That arrow next to it gives me a drop-down menu that tells me Google is my default, but makes it easy for me to switch to Live if I want to. I can also “Find on this Page,” “Find More Providers,” and “Manage Search Providers.” That latter was kind of eye-opening. I knew I could specify my default, but I also found out I could change my search provider from this box for a specific search. Additionally, I could turn Search Suggestions on and off.
Incidentally, clicking “Manage Search Providers” brought up a useful box for managing some of the browser's features and add-ons. Let me show you what I mean:
From this screen, with just a couple of clicks, I can manage my toolbars and extensions, search providers, accelerators, and InPrivate filtering. “Find More Providers” took me to Microsoft's add-on gallery for search providers. It included Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, the New York Times, and many more. I won't run out of search helpers here!
Before I close this section of the article, I wanted to show you how the right hand search box behaves now with Search Suggestions. Here's an image to give you an idea:
You can see not only Google's suggestions as it tries to complete what I'm typing in, but also my history – searches that I've already completed that are related to this topic. And it's worth noting that the address bar behaves the same way, potentially saving a lot of time.
You're probably expecting me to talk about the colored tabs in IE 8 that let you keep track of related groups of pages. I'll get to that, but first, I want to mention something cool that carried over from IE 7. If you didn't know about it before, some of you will find it to be a real time saver. I'm going to stay on the right of the browser and go down to show you this item, which warranted a little research on my part. Here's the screen shot for your reference:
Take a look at the home icon on the left. It has an arrow next to it. What can you do with it?
Do you see the options for “Add or Change Home Page” and “Remove All...”? Thanks to tabs, you can have more than one page as your home page – in fact, you can set up IE 8 to automatically open up to eight tabs at once when it starts, with a different page in each one. Microsoft provides a detailed description to help you set this up. As I said before, this was available in IE 7, but somehow it looks more obvious now; IE 8 seems to have a brighter color scheme than IE 7 in Vista, which makes icons stand out better.
Yes, as you've probably heard, colored tabs can help you group pages. If you've opened a link in a new tab, for example, all of the tabs turn the same color. If you're on page A and you open a link to page B in a new tab, they'll be the same color; a link from page B opened in a new tab (to page C) will also be the same color. If you then close all but one page and start opening links in new tabs again, you'll get a different color.
What I haven't seen anyone mention, other than Microsoft, is that if you right-click on a tab that is part of a group, you suddenly get a whole bunch of options. Let me show you:
I'll let Microsoft explain it: “By right-clicking on any tab, you can close the tab, close the tab group, or remove the tab from a group. From the same menu, you can refresh one or all tabs, open a new tab, reopen the last tab closed, or see a list of all recently closed tabs and reopen any or all of them.”
Internet Explorer 8 groups related tabs together. If you close one tab in a group, the next tab that is part of the same group pops up, so that you're not presented with a page that is not related to your current task. It's a nice example of developers adapting a tool to the way it's actually used, and to how its users think. It reminds me of Microsoft making its operating system more adaptable by putting icons for the most-used programs in the start menu. The programs that went there would be different for every user. Some users didn't like it at the time, but it became indispensable.
As you've probably guessed, I'm not done by a long shot, but I'm out of space. There will be more in the next part, when I hope to get to Microsoft's biggest innovations: accelerators and web slices. See you then!
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