Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon and just as with Firefox 3, the browser doesn’t look ground-breaking.  A closer look, however, exposes lots of neat new features from Microsoft, along with a nice addition that has been a part of Firefox for a while.  Follow the screenshots below to learn more about this next generation browser.

Related tabs are color coded, for easy sorting.

Web Slices are another new feature.  They allow websites to create dynamic feeds for IE8.  They are like RSS widgets to the user.

Internet explorer 8 adds a feature called “Accelerators”.  Highlight a section of the page and a blue anchor appears.  Click that anchor to get a popup menu of accelerators, which are actions to perform using that text, such as posting a blog, or mapping an address.  More accelerators can be added from the web to add functionality.

In this example, highlighting the word Internet, and using the Encarta accelerator, brings up a definition of the Internet.

The add-on manager in IE8 allows you to enable or disable troublesome plugins, toolbars and extensions.  It also allows you to manage accelerators, search providers, and settings for InPrivate (which will be discussed shortly).  There is also a link to find more add-ons at the IE8 gallery.

IE8 adds an integrated website checker called SmartScreen.  It checks websites against a blacklist of known malicious websites and blocks them, also allowing you to report a suspicious site.

An icon next to the address bar enables the compatability view, which loads pages as they would be loaded in older browsers for compatability. 

The handy feed discovery menu finds feeds on a page, and gives you a way to view them in one place and gives you one click access to the RSS feed, for subscription.

The Internet Explorer Gallery will be the place to go to find ad ons, accelerators, search providers and web slices.  This allows for easy customization of the browser from one location.

InPrivate allows you to browse the internet without leaving any tracks.  In this mode, IE doesn’t store files in the cache, doesn’t keep cookies, or add to the history.  Simply put, IE covers your tracks while you’re in a session.

Another important new features include, a menu option to go directly to the Delete Browsing History dialog.  The new dialog allows you to clear your cache, delete browsing history, remove cookies, etc, without having to dig through the Internet options dialog.

A nice Firefox feature has finally arrived in IE with the Reopen Last Browsing Session dialog, which allows allows you to restore the last tabs you were working on when you closed IE.  I wish this would work automatically, or be presented as a prompt, like it does in Firefox, but it is nice to know the option is there.  A nice wrinkle Microsoft added is that when bad code on a website, on in an add-on crashes your browser, the offending tab will be closed, and all others restored upon restarting IE8.  In my test, the results were mixed.  A tab crashed the browser, it restarted with IE frozen and unresponsive, and I had to kill IE from the task manager.  When I restarted the browser, the offending tab was gone, and my others remained open.  Interestingly enough, the tab seemed to crash the browser because of a site being coded for IE7 not being able to handle a beta.  As with any beta, the buggy behavior will probably be ironed out by the release. 

Overall, while not as groundbreaking as say, the jump from IE3 to IE4, there were plenty of nice features added, including some that should have been a part of Internet Explorer from a while.  My main complaint is that I wish Microsoft would release interim updates of its browser over time instead of waiting and releasing new browsers to coincide with new operating systems.  This would allow Web Developers to keep sites tailored to new IE features, instead of having to adopt them every few years when a new OS is released.

Written by: Hilton T. Young