A first look at Internet Explorer 8

The first beta version of an application is usually long on bugs, short on features and bears little resemblance to
the eventual finished program. And so I expected most of my time with Internet Explorer 8 to be working around unexpected crashes and strange behaviour. But no: despite the warnings that the beta was just for developers, I found it ran smoothly and gave me no real problems.

For starters, the download is relatively small, at 14MB. It installed quickly and with no complications, then opened to display an interface that looked similar to Internet Explorer 7. The program ran well, occasionally a little on the slow side (entirely normal with betas), but with no crashes. Microsoft has been working on browser reliability. In particular, they’re introducing a feature called Tab Isolation, which means a crash in one tab is much less likely to bring down the whole browser. Better still, the new Automatic Crash Recovery feature will try to recover and restore a crashed tab, and if there’s a critical error – someone turns the power off, say – it’ll
restore all the tabs you had open. We tried closing IE8 processes from Task Manager and this worked faultlessly.

SHINY AND NEW Internet Explorer 8 still looks a lot like its predecessor, but it’s the little things – like the intriguing Activities and the frustration-relieving Tab Isolation – that make the difference.

Activities and WebSlices

The IE8 beta includes two major new productivity features. The first, Activities, lets you carry out an action
on text in the current page. I visited the site of a local restaurant, for instance, highlighted their address with my mouse. After right-clicking and moving my mouse to the Map with Live Maps option, IE8 displayed their location on a small map (and there’s a button to open the map in a full-sized window).

Other Activities let you work on full blocks of text, like a news story, then quote them in blogs or your web mail
account (see the walkthrough here). There are only a few of these right now, but it’s easy to imagine others. A price comparison Activity, say, to select a product name and find the best deal at uk.shopping.com. How about a currency conversion Activity, where you choose a value in dollars and see the current pound sterling equivalent? Or a movie Activity, to let you select a title and read its Internet Movie Database reviews? IE8 comes with a tool to help you find and install new Activities, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of possibilities when the finished version is released.

The other big addition to IE8 is a feature called WebSlices. These let you subscribe to regularly updated content in a web page, such as news headlines, weather, an eBay item you’re interested in, and more. A new button appears on the toolbar for every WebSlice subscription, and it becomes highlighted when the target web
content has changed (someone else has bid for that eBay bargain, for instance). WebSlices are an interesting idea, but you can’t apply them to just any site; a web page has to be specially written to take advantage of them. Will developers make the effort? We’ll wait and see. 

Interface changes

I was disappointed to hear that Microsoft was dumping the Links toolbar in IE8, and sure enough it’s gone. Vanished. Disappeared forever. Don’t get too upset, though. It’s replaced by the Favorites toolbar, which,
as you might imagine, can hold, well, Favorites. But it’s also the place to keep your WebSlices. And you can store feeds there, too, which, like WebSlices, will be displayed in bold whenever they’ve been updated.

There are only so many buttons you can squeeze onto one toolbar, so you might prefer to keep your feeds and
WebSlices in folders. The folder name will be displayed in bold if anything it contains has been updated. Click on
it and a menu appears showing the contents, and again updated sites have their names highlighted in bold. It’s all very easy to use.

IE8 otherwise looks just like IE7, although there is one area that now behaves differently in several ways: the
address bar. And some of the changes are very welcome. Have you ever been emailed a URL, for instance, that you can’t just copy and paste into a browser because it’s split across two or more lines? With IE8 this doesn’t matter any more. The browser strips out excess carriage returns and line feeds, so just paste that lengthy address in and you’ll get the address you need.

I’m less sure about other changes. In IE7, clicking in the address bar would select the current URL, ready for
copying to the clipboard. Now it just inserts a cursor, ready for editing, and you need a double-click to select the whole address. I tend to copy web addresses more than edit them, so this doesn’t seem as convenient to me.

And if you currently use inLine AutoComplete (where IE7 completes, rather than just suggests addresses if you’ve entered them before), then you’re also going to be annoyed with IE8 because the current beta has
dropped the feature entirely.

SAFE AND SOUND The Phishing Filter becomes the Safety Filter in IE8. It’s ‘more comprehensive’, apparently, though we don’t yet know why.

Improved security

Security remains a vital issue for any browser, and so I was sure Microsoft would introduce some new features in IE8. And they have, although these are only relatively small tweaks.

There’s another new address bar feature. Phishing sites and other scammers sometimes use long addresses to confuse people (such as www.badsite.barclays.com.cn), but the browser will highlight the entire domain
name so you can identify where you are.

The Manage Add-ons dialogue box has been revamped, supposedly to make it easier to find all the toolbars
and controls you’ve installed. It certainly looks better, but I’m not sure that it’s functionally very different to IE7.

The Phishing Filter has been updated to something called the Safety Filter. Microsoft say this will be ‘more
comprehensive’, but right now it’s looking very similar.

Technical changes include the ability to restrict ActiveX controls to run on one particular site only – handy, as this limits exploitation by hackers. And the current Data Execution Prevention (DEP) option is enabled by default, again reducing the opportunities malware has to infect your system. So far it’s looking like IE8 will improve your security a little, without changing anything enough to cause major problems, which sounds
like a reasonable compromise to me.

BOUNCING BACK IE8 will politely offer to restore any open tabs if your last browser session crashed for some reason.

Standards support

One of the most frequent complaints about previous versions of Internet Explorer is its quirky handling of web
design standards. Microsoft says this issue is a high priority in IE8, and the final version of the browser will comply with CSS 2.1, while also supporting HTML 5 and parts of CSS 3. The beta already passes tough online checkups such as the Acid2 Test (www.webstandards.org/action/acid2), which IE7 failed. So moving to IE8 should make life easier for developers, while the rest of us get to enjoy more web sites as they were supposed to be seen.

It’s been an impressive first beta, then. Activities are the most interesting IE8 feature, and will soon be providing powerful new ways to make more of web site data. Anyone who’s ever been frustrated by an Internet Explorer crash will appreciate Tab Isolation and Automatic Crash Recovery. And WebSlices have potential, though their success will depend on the support they get from individual sites. Other changes aren’t as convincing. Is the Favorites Bar a good thing? Does the Safety Filter offer anything more than the Phishing Filter? The new Manage Add-ons looks prettier, but is it actually easier to use? I’m not sure, but these are still early days, and the finished version may not be out until the end of the year. Microsoft is heading in the right direction though, and it’ll be interesting to see what else will materialise in the next beta.  

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