Microsoft finally shows new interest with IE8 Beta 2

A while ago, Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released to the general public which meant it was ready for some general testing. Most of the new features on IE8 were created to catch up with all the much better competing browsers. However, there were some good new features that make it unique. Of course, lots of criticism has also come up, saying how bad IE8 compared to other browsers like Firefox. But it's a Beta, so you shouldn't expect too much from it. I was pretty surprised to see how far IE8 had progressed from IE7, but it still has a ways to go.

Here's a brief review of the unique features of IE8 Beta 2:

The accelerators, which were called activities in Beta 1, are definitely a great improvement and very useful tool in general for most people. With plenty of different activities to choose from, and probably plenty more to come (it's open to developers so custom accelerators can be built), it'll provide convenience for the users. It's kind of like AnswerTips except with a lot more options.

Web Slices is also a new feature that is helpful to get you the information you want from your favorite websites without having to load them. I personally won't have much use for it because I don't check for updates to things much but they are useful and you can think of it as a mini feed reader that reads websites instead of feeds, which is quite interesting.

Their new tab system is also much improved and shows that they are starting to innovate on existing features. Now, tabs are color coded in groups, so that whenever you click on a link to go to a new tab, the new tab will be in the same color category for easy browsing. You can also close groups of tabs together.

They've also got the visual search which is in my opinion pretty useless. It really doesn't do anything to help you search for better results unless all the search results look the same except for the images.

By the way, if you haven't tried beta 2 yet, I suggest you don't. It's highly unstable and has many bugs which are bound to happen because it's still a beta. There are enormous amounts of errors that can occur, and it sometimes closes by itself randomly. Fortunately, their backup system is great! It actaully boasts the ability to back up your tabs properly and quickly. Also, it can just close one tab after it finds that only one tab is responsible for errors.

That pretty much sums up IE8 beta 2, except I should mention that with IE8, the IE line of uncompliant browsers will stop. Now, webmasters' two CSS sheets are no longer for IE and the other browsers, but instead for IE7+under, and IE8+firefox and all the other compliant browsers. I hope IE8 will prove to be a great browser. After all, IE still holds the dominant position in terms of market share, which means most people are still plagued by IE7's lack of features and performance and are putting up with it by being too lazy to switch, or just want to be loyal to Microsoft. IE8 still has a lot of catch up to do, but at least Microsoft seems to be finally showing some interest in this browser field.
Tags: Microsoft, Internet, Internet Explorer, Accelerators, Web slices, IE8B2, IE8, BlitzTech Blog

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