Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has been released

Last night (Wednesday 27 August) I attended an event hosted by the Internet Explorer division of Microsoft to witness the launch of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

I was taken through the new features, all of which will feature in the final build of Internet Explorer 8, by the senior product manager of Internet Explorer, Ryan Servatius.

Before the showing began Ryan explained the importance of giving the public beta versions of Internet Explorer, to find out their experiences, both positive and negative, and how that helps shape the final product.

“When we shipped Internet Explorer 7, we talked to communities around the world to understand what end users want.”

He identified the most popular activities users perform on the internet, which include searching, email, social networking, news, shopping and online gaming. According to Ryan Internet Explorer Beta 2 has been optimised for all of these, with the emphasis on faster and safer web browsing – what Microsoft likes to term ‘trustworthy browsing’.

What’s new?

Smart Address Bar

In any web browser the address bar is one of the most important aspects, so it is fitting that the address bar in Internet Explorer 8 has been given a radical overhaul. To speed up your internet browsing, the way the Smart Address Bar guesses what web site address you are typing in has been altered. In previous versions of Internet Explorer, the address bar would only bring up matches for the beginning of the web address.  In Internet Explorer 8 you can type in any part of the address, and the Smart Address Bar will begin bringing up relevant addresses. It also searches your History, Favorites and RSS Feeds information.

Although there is something similar in Firefox 3, what Ryan showed me next was a very interesting and unique feature of the Smart Address Bar – especially in relation to the idea of ‘trustworthy browsing’.

This feature was domain highlighting, and helps you identify if a web site you are on is real, or if it is part of a phishing scam. When you are on a legitimate web site, the domain name (for example google or windowsvistamagazine) is highlighted. This is a simple and unobtrusive method of letting the user know if it is safe to use the web site.

‘New Tab’ page redesign

The page that is displayed when you open a new tab has been given a new look. From this page you can easily reopen any tabs you have previously closed, and there is a link that allows you to reopen your last browsing session – so all your tabs from the last time you used Internet Explorer are restored. You can also start InPrivate Browsing and use an Accelerator – more of these later.

Enhanced tabbed browsing

I’ve been using tabbed browsing for a while now and I’ve found it to be a great addition to Internet Explorer. However I can sometimes get a bit carried away, opening new tabs for every link I’m interested in, and this can result in me getting utterly confused about what tab came from where. A neat new feature in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is Tab Groups, where new tabs are grouped together with the tab they branched off from, and each group is colour coded for ease of use.
Tabbed browsing has been given greater stability also, and so if one tab crashes and becomes unresponsive, you do not need to close down the whole of Internet Explorer 8 – just the tab that is having problems.

Accelerators

Accelerators are a very interesting feature of Internet Explorer 8, and as this version of Internet Explorer nears completion the benefits they bring to browsing are becoming more apparent. They allow you to take information from a web page and use it in another web service, without having to leave the page you’re on.  One of the most common examples used to demonstrate Accelerators (and which was used last night) was highlighting an address of a restaurant. The blue Accelerator button appears, and you can then choose what service you’d like to use with the highlighted information, such as emailing it with Windows Live Mail or displaying a map of the restaurant with Live Maps. This means you don’t have to copy and paste the address into a separate web site, so it cuts down on the number of steps you have to take to get something done. Speeding up your internet browsing is not just a case of having a faster broadband connection, or tweaking the code of the internet browser; it is also about speeding up how the end user uses the internet browser, and this seems to be acknowledged in the latest beta release.

There are plenty of other Accelerators which give you the ability to translate the page into a chosen language, use the highlighted text to search the internet and check eBay auctions. There are more Accelerators to choose from other than the ones that come installed with Internet Explorer 8, and anyone who can program in the XML language will be able to create one for their web site, so hopefully we will see plenty of new Accelerators for all kinds of web-based activities.
The eBay accelerator (ie8.ebay.co.uk) in particular, seems like it could be very useful. If you were browsing a band’s MySpace page, for example, you could highlight the band’s name, click the Accelerator button and hover over Find with eBay search. This will bring up live listings of the band’s merchandise currently for sale on eBay.

Web slices

Web slices were a feature of the previous version of Internet Explorer 8 beta, and their functionality remains the same. These bring information from user-defined sources straight to the Favorites toolbar. You can select which part of a web page you want to be updated about, and any new updates will be displayed in bold. Selecting the Top In All Topics part of the Digg web site to become a web slice, for example, will display the top 10 stories submitted when you click on it, without you having to go to the web site. When a new story is added, the Web Slice will be highlighted bold.

Hovering over the part of the page you want to become a ‘slice’ will display the Web Slice button.

Keep abreast of breaking news straight from your Favorites toolbar.

Instant Search

The Instant Search box, added in Internet Explorer 7, also has some major new features. Now as you type in your query, rather than showing up previous or popular searches, Instant Search will begin showing your results, and with the ‘visual search’ feature you can see pictures of what you’re searching for – handy for online shopping.

Cross-Site Scripting Filter

In an attempt to make browsing the internet safer, the Cross-Site Scripting Filter of Internet Explorer 8 blocks cross-site attacks that try to steal your data from legitimate web sites. Although these attacks may not be a major concern to most casual internet users, it is good to see it being taken seriously, and adds credence to the ‘trustworthy browsing’ idea.

Safety toolbar

The new Safety toolbar allows the user to clear their browsing history in a much more intelligent way. In previous versions of Internet Explorer, deleting your browsing history also removed cookies that kept you logged into sites that you visit regularly. With the new Delete Browsing History tools, you can choose to keep these cookies so that you don’t have to go through the hassle of signing into each web site again.

Compatibility View

Some web pages that have been designed for Internet Explorer 7 may not show up correctly when using Internet Explorer 8, so this has been avoided in the beta 2 release by adding a Compatibility View button next to the Smart Address bar. Clicking this will make most pages display correctly in the browser.

The icon for the Compatibility View button is a broken page

There are many more features of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, most of which will only become apparent the more you use it. To try it out go to www.microsoft.com/ie8 and let us know what you think. The more people who try it and report back to Microsoft, the better the final product will be.