Internet Explorer 8 an improvement but still the laggard
By Dave Jeyes
Microsoft announced the release of its latest version of the Internet Explorer Web browser, IE8, for public use. While the company is touting the browsers speed and security, it’s still the slowest major browser and its security remains to be seen.
The Good
Microsoft has added some interesting new functionality to the latest version of Internet Explorer. Most notably are the InPrivate browsing, accelerators and Web slices features.
InPrivate browsing is similar to the existing feature in Safari and beta feature in Firefox that allows you to surf without accepting cookies or recording history. This feature helps you to tidy up shared computers and keeps sites that you’re not familiar with from leaving cookies on your machine.
Accelerators let you select text on a Web page and share it through services such as Twitter, Map locations or email the information. You install plugins and the options become available when you right click on selected text.
Web slices actively monitor sites such as your email for new messages. Currently there are dozens of Web slices available for Digg, StumbleUpon and Microsoft services such as Live Maps and MSN Headlines.
The Bad
While these new features seem somewhat intriguing, they’re also not trivial concepts for the average computer user. How do you explain to your grandma that you’re serving up a Web slice or where to find the accelerator on her computer?
Another major pet peeve of mine is software that isn’t backwards compatible. Microsoft has revamped the rendering engine in IE8 to support more standards, which is great. However, in doing so, it’s broken compatibility with some Web pages that were designed specifically for use with old versions of Internet Explorer. To bridge the gap, Microsoft included a button to take your browser’s rendering backwards in time.
The Ugly
In revamping Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, Microsoft still could not close the gap between Internet Explorer’s speed and that of its competitors. In Walt Mossberg’s test, IE8 was bested by Firefox, Safari and Google’s brand new browser, Chrome.
Internet Explorer will be available as a free download at noon today. There’s no word as to when Windows computers around the globe will start automatically updating, but you can rush right over to the IE8 page to get it.
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Entry was posted
on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 10:57 am
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Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
Stumble It!
March 20th, 2009
Already hacked and confirmed by MS as hacked.
But Safari gets hacked far easier.
Check news on CanSecWest.
March 21st, 2009
I don’t get it.
So it’s bad to have new features because they’re hard to explain to your grandmother? Does that mean that Safari is worse, and the beta of firefox as well because they have those features?
The other “bad” entry about backward compatibility has also been addressed by the button. You either don’t advance or you do – are you saying you’d prefer it stayed at the previous standards level since the button still apparently makes things bad?
I just don’t get how either of those are “bad.”