Internet Explorer 8: New and Improved

Internet Explorer is known for having the majority of the market share for Internet browsers, and it's role as a part of the Windows operating system. Microsoft says their new browser is better than ever and worth the upgrade! Here are a few ways IE8 has improved from IE7, and why you might be interested—even if you haven't liked IE in the past.

Accelerators are a new addition to Internet Explorer. These tools save you browsing time by turning common searches into a simple right-click function. For example, highlight an address, right click on it, and choose a mapping feature to veiw a small map of the location and a link to get to directions. This saves time you would have spent opening a new window, looking up a map website, and copy/pasting the address on a mapping website, performing the search, then clicking the directions option.

You can see search results on multiple engines like Google, Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia. Simply highlight any length of text on the web site, like “Empire State Building” for example, and right click. Accelerators will either show entries directly from the menu, or open the page of your choice in a new tab. You can jump to “Empire State Building” search results on Google, the dictionary or Wikipedia entry, or even look for books or related products on Amazon or Ebay instead of pulling up the sites individually and performing the search. There are dozens of accelerators, including shortcuts to Urban Dictionary, YouTube, and Facebook.

Another new IE8 feature is the Web Slice. It's a miniature window that is available for participating websites (indicated by the green web slice icon at the top of the page) that can be added to your favorites toolbar. For example, you bid on an Ebay item, then add a slice for that particular item, which appears in your favorites toolbar. When the slice has new information (and you can edit how often it checks), the slice title become bold so you know when someone bid on your item no matter what site you are on at the time. You can then click the slice to see a miniature page showing your item, increase the bid, or click a link to go to that page. There are also web slices for news, stocks, weather, sports, and email sites.

IE8 has some features that have already been introduced on other browsers. Like Chrome, IE8's “tab isolation” prevents the whole window from crashing if one tab malfunctioning, and the “In-private browsing” that allows users to surf undetected by their computer. Like Firefox, users can restore the previous session if the browser window is interrupted. Like most browsers, you can now restore recent tabs if you accidentally close them.

Internet Explorer 8 has new speed and security technology that has improved from the last version. To read more about the improvement and other features on IE8, go to microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer. You should probably back up your files and create a restore point before you install IE8.