August 1, 2009

Internet Explorer 8 has been out for a while now.  It gets updated through Windows update on your computer.  If you haven't upgraded by now, I suggest you go to the Windows update site and do so.  There are several improvements which make the upgrade worthwhile.

IE8 is faster at browsing than earlier versions.  Competition for other browsers made this improvement necessary for Microsoft to keep remaining competitive.

IE8 has accelerators.  When you highlight test on a web page, an arrow appears.  When you click on the arrow, you are offered a number of options as to what to do with the selected text.  For instance, you might highlight an address, then select to show that address in a mapping application.  As time goes on, there will be more accelerator options for different scenarios.

It also has a program which runs in the background called smartscreen filter.  As you browse, it checks the web pages an links you visit to see if they are malicious sites (called phishing sites) and will warn you if there is a possibility it may cause you a problem.  These sites impersonate trusted or known sites and will attempt to collect personal information from you.

It also has a feature called web slices.  A web slick is a portion of a page you subscribe to and which enables you to see when updated content—such as the current temperature, or a changing auction price—is available from your favorite websites. Once you have subscribed to the Web Slice, it appears as a link on the Favorites bar. When the Web Slice is updated, the link on the Favorites bar will appear with bold formatting. You can then click the link to see the updated content.

IE 8 is also more stable and recovers from crashes.

One of the best features of IE8 is called InPrivate browsing.  When you go to Tools, and click on InPrivate browsing, IE 8 opens up a new browsing window and protects you from several things.  Let's say you are planning a trip and just want to check on air fares, car rental, hotel, etc.  Many sites ask for email address, etc, but they may also do things in the background to keep track of what you are doing so they can offer to sell you their product.  How to be safe, have a free mail address (like hotmail, yahoo, etc.) then click on InPrivate browsing.  Now as you go from site to site, IE 8 will keep any cookies in memory, rather than saving them to your hard drive, then delete them when you end your session.  It also will not store any web page browsing history or any forms or passwords.  All the background stuff Internet Explorer normally does is either disabled or encrypted so that the sites you visit can't collect any information on your session.  This is the greatest feature of the new Internet Explorer.