A Look at Microsoft's Newest Internet Explorer

Microsoft has released the second beta version of it's upcoming internet explorer 8. The newest version of IE has better support for html standards, and also a wealth of new features such as InPrivate and WebSlices.

After the completion of Internet Explorer version 6.0 Microsoft stopped working on their browser. Following that other browsers such as Firefox and Opera introduced new features, and left Internet Explorer far behind. Microsoft finally did get back into the competition with the release of IE7 which supported more standards and included tabbed browsing. Now with version eight on the way they are hoping that they can finally catch up with the other browsers.

Internet Explorer 8 will have full support for CSS and other web standards and will also display pages in standards mode by default. This will bring it equal to Firefox in this regard, and will make almost all standards complaint pages fully accessible in IE8. While IE7 was an improvement on standards it still fell behind the other browsers available at that time, now Microsoft appears to have finally caught up.

Three big new (and original) features that IE8 will support are InPrivate, WebSlices, and Accelerators. Yet all are not without issues. First of all the accelerators really make little to no sense. The idea is that you can map keywords such as "Maps" to bring up Google maps, or Mapquest or whatever mapping website you prefer. However this approach is slightly odd and still inferior to simply using a search engine, going straight to the url, or using something akin to Firefox 3's awesome bar. Webslices is also rather useless as it allows predetermined sections of websites to be saved and used independently of the originating site such as a widget. The problem here is that using a traditional javascript widget is still equally as effective will work for all browsers, and is easier to manage. It is hard to anticipate a future in which Webslices are useful.

InPrivate on the other hand is genuinely a good and useful idea. It allows a session to take place that is exempt from the saving of all data such as form inputs, cookies, history, and temporary files. Often you know that a certain task is going to bring up alot of false positives in the future, and by being able to work with a more temporary environment you can keep suggestions in normal mode more relevant. However the current implementation of launching in a new window is a tad annoying. If it could convert to InPrivate mode within the current window this feature would be much nicer.

The other problem with IE8 is that it holds over the horrible interface from IE7. The mixture of uncustomizable toolbars, and needless circular buttons is a big pain and probably part of the reason that IE6 is still being used in some places. While Firefox also has taken a step backwards with it's default interface in version 3 it is at least easier to skin and customize. Even then the new firefox nor Opera's overly curvy interface is not as bad as IE7 and 8. What the Internet Explorer team needs to do is to instead keep things simple and return to a simpler interface like the one that was used way back on IE6 and before.

In the end, while IE8 is an improvement it will do very little to cut back that on the deflection to Firefox as InPrivate is the only advantage that it holds.