Freeze 'n' Breeze

The subject line might be confusing but to say really IE 8 Beta is back with an impressive update for a software that stagnated in Microsoft for the past years. Its more elegant and easier to use, while adding many of the missing features.

“The brand-new implementation of Standards mode in Internet Explorer 8 offers the best viewing experience of web pages created according to the latest web standards.” That means many of the web pages that include code custom tailored for IE won’t look very good, so you need to enable a compatibility view (for some reason, intranet sites are rendered in the compatibility mode by default). A post from March has more information about Microsoft’s decision to apply the standards mode by default.

IE8 adds support for suggestions in the search box and this is not restricted to Live Search. Microsoft lists many search providers that can be added: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and others. The new interface makes it easy to switch between search providers by clicking on the icons displayed at the bottom.

Another feature that should have been added to IE7 is inline search: now you can search inside a page from an elegant bar similar to the one from Safari.

Notepad wasn’t the best software for viewing the source code of a page, so IE8 includes a simple text viewer like Firefox and safari with syntax highlighting. Too bad that you can’t view the source code for selections.

A great feature from Google Toolbar allowed you to select some text from a web page and send it to Blogger, Gmail or other services. Microsoft added this feature and calls it “accelerator“. “Tired of cutting and pasting information from one website to another for everyday tasks? Now there’s a better way. Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday—from any page you visit.”

Firefox’s microsummaries didn’t become popular even if they solved an interesting problem: subscribing to frequently updated information like stock quotes or weather reports. IE’s web slices, based on the hAtom microformat, are more visually appealing, but I couldn’t find any interesting example in the gallery. Internet Explorer lets you add to the favorites bar heterogeneous subscriptions: bookmarks, feeds and web slices, even though the subscription process is not uniform. Like Firefox 3, the latest version of IE adds one-click bookmarking, visually represented by a star icon.

IE8 includes a security feature that will be rarely used for non-adult sites: private browsing. “InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 similar to safari Private browsing that helps prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no evidence of your browsing or search history.” To use it, you need to click on Safety > InPrivate Browsing, which opens a new window where you can browse privately. To permanently use private browsing, edit IE’s shortcut and append -private in the target field (you could also type iexplore -private in the Run dialog or Vista’s search box).

Overall, this is a highly recommended update for IE7, even though you’ll find some sites aren’t displayed properly. Google Maps finally works well but igoogle sucks and some Google services like Gmail have minor interface problems. IE looks good again and I’ll probably try to use it again ….

But still all i want to ask one thing to the IE developer community
“What does IE8 have ” new “that I would have to leave Firefox for? “