Microsoft Internet Explorer 8: Mixed Reactions

On the first weekend after its launch, IE 8 seemed not to impress many users. A number of sources in the media commented on the low percentage of downloads. Some sites noted that the new browser accounted for less than two percent of all Internet traffic, and that Firefox 3 did far better on its first weekend of release back in June – which is quite a feat when you consider the comparative market shares of Firefox browsers versus IE browsers.

“I suppose the kindest description of user reaction to IE 8's first public outing would be 'underwhelming,'” noted Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, one of largest web site traffic monitoring companies in the world. Cullen went on to say that usage of Firefox 3 more than doubled, from 7.8 percent at beta testing to 18.9 percent over the three-day period following the launch.

And Computerworld noticed a worrying trend for those downloads: Microsoft seems to be growing IE 8's market share at the expense of its older browsers. While the company is no doubt glad to see users of their older products upgrading to the new browser, it isn't just IE 8 whose market share has grown in recent days; its rivals have seen an increase in their market shares as well. While IE saw its market share grow about 0.7 percent after its final code was released, Firefox 3 grew its market share by half a percentage point – as did Apple's Safari 3.2. Even Google's Chrome increased its market share a tiny bit.

IE8 Improvements in Search

Lifehacker said some good things about the search tools to be found in Internet Explorer 8. They noted that power user features included suggestions from the search bar, instant “answers” and right-click “accelerators.” The comment about instant answers seems to be a reference to what Microsoft is calling “Visual Search.” Visual search lets you see images that can provide you with an immediate answer to your question, thanks in part to partnerships with other search providers. “For example, typing 'Seattle weather' with Live Search will instantly show you a preview of the current weather directly in the Search Box drop-down,” explains Microsoft on its IE 8 web site.

These and other features not only work with in-house Microsoft products, but other providers that you've chosen to install. So if Google is your preferred search engine, IE 8 pulls results from there.

Acknowledging that many users treat the address bar like a search engine, IE 8 will now provide suggestions from the user's chosen search engine if they put a question mark in front of their query. The browser will also search for titles and URLs of pages you've previously visited that match the text you've typed – another nod to user behavior in that people often search for pages they've examined previously.

IE 8 makes effective use of colored tabs, a very welcome addition. If you like to open search results in separate tabs, IE will give all related tabs the same color. So if you searched for “Batman” and opened several links, IE 8 would give them one color; if you later searched for “Superman” in the same session and opened several links, their tabs would show a different color, allowing you to easily distinguish between the two superheroes. As an additional convenience, you can close entire tab groups, not just single tabs.

Power searchers should take a close look at IE 8's “accelerators.” An accelerator lets users speed up their everyday online tasks by simply highlighting text from a web page and clicking a blue Accelerator icon that appears above the text. Accelerators let users get driving directions, translate and define words, email content to their friends, and more. Users can add, delete, enable and disable accelerators by clicking on Manage Add-ons from the Tools button. Microsoft even provides an accelerators gallery to help users customize their browser and make it a much more effective tool for the ways they explore content online.

The accelerator gallery is well worth a look. It includes the ones you would expect from Microsoft that provide the ability to send email instantly with Hotmail, get instant prices with Live Search Products, and map addresses with LiveMaps. But it also includes accelerators that let users map addresses with Yahoo Local Maps, find and preview eBay items, use Google to define words and find news stories, and more.

Possible IE 8 Issues

Web developers have complained bitterly about Internet Explorer's lack of compatibility with web standards such as CSS, HTML 4 and XHTML. IE 8 was supposed to fix this issue, at least to some extent. Unfortunately, it hasn't. The Web Standards Project applied its Acid Test 3 to IE 8, and discovered that the new browser doesn't work nearly as well with CSS, HTML 4 and XHTML as Firefox and Google browsers.

Because Internet Explorer has historically been incompatible with certain technologies, web developers have needed to design their pages so that they could be viewed well by both standards-compliant browsers and by IE browsers. Sometimes they even had to code for particular variations of IE browsers, since Microsoft made significant changes between IE 6, IE 7, and now IE 8. Fortunately, IE 8 has a “Compatibility View” that allows users to view sites designed for earlier versions of IE. With any luck, this feature should lead to a little less hair loss and not as many long hours for web site developers.

Internet Explorer 8 offers more protection than earlier versions of the browser against malicious web sites, and a report by NSS Labs claims that it blocks two to four times as many malicious web sites as other browsers. The validity of that report has been challenged by Steve Ragan, writing for the Tech Herald, on several grounds. First, of course, it's a little suspicious because the funding was provided by Microsoft. Second, less than 500 known malicious web sites were used for the test. Third, all browsers were used in their “default” mode, when Firefox, Safari, and Opera boast a plethora of add-ons designed to provide layered security against attacks – the most effective kind of security currently known. To add insult to injury, the test featured an older version of Safari, despite the latest version becoming available a week before the testing period.

Microsoft has also claimed that IE 8 is faster than the other browsers on the market. This is by no means certain, as more than one reviewer has commented that it seems at least a little slow.

Another welcome new feature for Internet Explorer 8 is privacy controls. Among other things, they block third-party cookies. But a number of reviewers have said that they are too cumbersome to use, and expect many users to not even bother. (Those prone to conspiracy theories may wonder if that was the point of making them difficult to use).

IE 8: Worth Using?

So after all this, one has to wonder: is IE 8 worth downloading? That may very much depend on your web surfing habits. If you're already a power user and enjoy the features and add-ons you get with Firefox 3 or other browsers you can easily customize, there might not be a compelling reason to get it. If you're a web site developer who wants to make sure the sites you build work with all of the major browsers, you probably should download it, even with its Compatibility View.

It's telling that Microsoft includes Internet Explorer 8 among the list of features that users will be able to “turn off” in Windows 7. This doesn't mean it can actually be removed from the soon-to-be-released operating system. According to  Microsoft's Windows 7 engineering blog, features that can be turned off “will not be available for use, which means binaries and data are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer.” Instead, the features are “staged” so that they can “easily be added back to the running OS without additional media.” So if you install Windows 7, turn off IE 8 and later change your mind, you won't have to wonder where you put the DVD to make the change.

Does this mean that Microsoft thinks a lot of people won't want to use IE 8? Well, it's possible to envision a scenario where a business decides to move to Windows 7, but hasn't yet approved Internet Explorer 8 for use by its employees. In that case, they would want to install Windows 7 with IE 8 disabled. It wouldn't necessarily be a reflection on the browser; when it comes to making software changes, most companies are conservative. This is especially true when it concerns software that could do serious harm to the network – and let's face it, browsers that aren't properly secured, or are otherwise unknown quantities, carry that potential with them, especially when they're as new as IE 8.

But there's one last group of people who really should consider installing IE 8: those who run Windows-based computers. Don Reisinger, writing for CNet, explains the reasoning in an article in which he expounds on why he won't be turning off IE 8 in Windows 7. “I think it'll be a downright hassle to disable it, and doing so could mean that I'll be forced to go to the 'Windows Features' pane and turn it back on when I want to go to one of those annoying sites that works best with Internet Explorer, or to a Microsoft page that requires Internet Explorer to download what I need.”

As long as Microsoft has a dominant market share in the software that helps so many people get their essential tasks done, there will always be a market for the next version of Internet Explorer – if for no other reason than the one explained above. Despite its flaws, IE 8 is a welcome improvement over previous versions of the browser. Whether it will help Microsoft increase its browser market share remains to be seen; so far, however, the indications aren't promising.