Internet Explorer 8 Beta Review #1

After installing the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and rebooted my machine I opened IE8 and it prompts you for preferences to things like your search provider and such. Then the initial page has an arrow that explains the function to be able to emulate IE7 if you wish while running IE8. I thought this was pretty cool. The button looks like this:

Activity Providers

IE8 gives you the option to view the top activities that online users do. Some of these activity categories are:

• Blog – Windows Live Spaces
• Define – MSN Encarta
• Find – eBay, Facebook, StumbleUpon
• Lookup – MSNBC, StumbleUpon
• Map – Live Search Maps, Yahoo! Local Maps
• Send – Windows Live Hotmail
• Share - Facebook
• Translate – Windows Live Translator

One of the things I liked that was put back into IE8 from IE6 was the menus that are listed in the upper left-hand corner. In IE7 I noticed that this was removed when you initially install and launch the application.

Webslices

IE8 offers Webslices which is like RSS feeds. I did not test much of this feature.

Browser Crashes

Given that I stream live video through ustream.tv my IE browser from time to time will crash and needs to restart or “look” for a solution to the problem. Well one feature that IE8 has is that when that it crashes, the last page you were viewing is recovered when the browser restarts.

I hated when the browser would crash and I would have to find the page I was on. It’s nice not to have to anymore.

At one point the IE8 browser would continually crash every few seconds but still would recover my previously viewed page. Having it crash that often is rather annoying. I was viewing my blog page: www.lockergnome.com/noahluis and it kept on crashing. Finally I decided to open the URL in Firefox. To my amazement it did not crash once.

This tells me that either the amount of content on the page, which was quite a lot, could not be handled by the browser or some of the content that resided on the page conflicted with the way IE8 is written. It’s a good thing that this is just the Beta version.

One last thing I noticed is that in the URL textbox Microsoft made it so that only the domain remains visible in black lettering when the rest of the URL remains grey. I thought this was worth noting although I’m not sure what real purpose it serves except to help with the visual aspects of the GUI.

Thus far the software has proven to still be unstable although there are some fixes here and there.