While rival browser makers Mozilla and Opera have launched the latest iterations of their products, Firefox 3.0 and respectively Opera 9.5, as early as June 2008, Microsoft is still in the development phase of Internet Explorer 8, the successor of IE7. August 27 marked the delivery of IE8 Beta 2, a deadline absurdly safeguarded by Microsoft, with the company only managing to confirm a release by the end of this month, and taking its due time when it came down to making available the bits for the browser second development milestone. Internet Explorer 8 is still far from the finish line, reportedly planned for November 2008, but Beta 2 feels more like a browser version ready for wrap-up than Beta 1.
The reason for this is the fact that, in comparison with the March 2008 release of IE8, the second Beta is packed with features and functionality aimed at the home and business users, on top of what has already been available to IT professionals and web content developers and designers. In this regard, IE8 Beta 1 was more of a skeleton on which Microsoft built Beta 2. Now, although Microsoft is not touting IE8 Beta 2 as a feature-complete version, it is clear that the Redmond company will move further only with the process of fine-tuning the browser got with Release to Web (RTW).
However, in no way is IE8 Beta 2 more than a Beta. The browser continues to have issues related to memory leaks, especially on websites containing Adobe Flash content. At the same time, tabs can become inaccessible following a crash recovery, but also unresponsive, failing to allow end users to close them. Beta 2 is not yet ready for production environments, but by all means, test driving the browser is an entirely different matter altogether. And there are plenty of reasons to do so, even for the most hardcore Firefox and Opera fans.
12 Reasons to Test Drive IE8 Beta 2
1. New UI – Microsoft is a loyal adept of continuity. In this regard, the redesign of IE8 Beta 2’s graphical user interface is rather subtle and keeping within the same line as IE7’s UX. However, the biggest plus in terms of user interface is the customization options offered by Beta 2.
“IE8 brings some changes that allow much more customization that I think users will be happy with. You can unlock the toolbars and drag the IE menu bar to a variety of places in IE8. You can also right click in IE8’s menu and choose Customize where you can have the refresh and stop buttons moved to the front of the Address Bar. Those who also prefer not to have the Favorites Bar showing will be pleased to know you can turn it off (although I don’t know why you would want to!),” revealed Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc.
2. Smart Address Bar – well, Opera 9.5 has it, and Firefox 3.0 has it, and Internet Explorer 8 does not fall behind in this category. The Smart Address bar is nothing short of a breath of fresh air when it comes down to navigation enhancements. This means that all that end users have to remember about an Internet location that they visited once is a keyword, or part of the name. No more digging through the browser’s history for websites. The Smart Address bar does all the heavy lifting for the users, searching across Favorites, History, and even RSS feeds.
“Based on our observations of IE7 and IE8 Beta 1 usage, we learned that roughly 80% of the time people’s destination on the web is a previously visited site. In the past, people would use their Favorites or History, or they’d just go through all the steps to navigate to the website again. The Smart Address Bar enables you to find Favorites and sites in your history by just typing a few letters. That’s much fewer steps than using the Favorites and History center. We also added the capability to search the title, web address and even folders for those who have organized their favorites,” explained IE Lead Program Manager Paul Cutsinger.
3. Tabbed Browsing Evolution – speaking of navigation, in IE8 Beta 2, tabbed browsing has evolved to a new level. In this context, not only does the browser group all tabs opened from the same location into groups, assigning a particular color to them, but New Tabs now offers a range of comprehensive options instead of a useless pseudo-blank page. Users are now able to navigate back to closed tabs, to relaunch the last browser session, to start InPrivate browsing, or to execute an Accelerator.
4. New Search/Find Experience – IE8 Beta 2 sports an entirely revamped search/find experience, and one that was long overdue for that matter. With this development release, Find On Page behaves as a toolbar that performs result counting and highlighting. “We’d heard from many, many users that the Find dialog in IE6 and IE7 was always getting in the way, making it hard to actually find content on the page. So, we’ve added a Find bar at the top of the page (finally!) that lets you more easily find content on the page,” Cutsinger added.
5. Web Slices – not new to Beta 2, since they were initially made available with IE8 Beta 1 as early as March of this year, Web Slices resides in the Favorites Bar and allows users to subscribe only to a certain portion of a website. With this feature, IE8 is capable of providing visual notifications to users in accordance with the updates introduced to the webpage area where they subscribed.
6. Accelerators (formerly Activities) - “Copy-navigate-paste is old. Accelerators are services that you access directly from the webpage in the context of what you’re doing, letting you bookmark, define, email, map and more with a simple selection. Even your search providers are available as Accelerators. Some Accelerators provide previews so that you can view the result without having to leave the current webpage. Clicking on an Accelerator opens a new tab with the full result,” explained Jane Kim – IE Program Manager.
7. Suggestions – there are two types of suggestions that IE8 Beta 2 offers. The Search Box Suggestions is designed as an enhancement to the search field, which is integrated by default into the UI of Internet Explorer 8. Users can now receive real time suggestion for their queries from their favorite search provider. In addition, IE8 Beta 2 can also go as far as to serve Suggested Sites.
“In IE8 we make it easier to find sites you might like. Once you turn on Suggested Sites, IE looks at what sites you visit and then offers recommendations of other similar or related sites, right from the Favorites Bar. If you don’t have Suggested Sites on already, try it out by going to the Favorites Center and clicking on the ‘Turn on Suggested Sites’ button at the bottom of the menu,” Kim said.
8. Reliability – with Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is validating the proverbial “better late than never” approach, and is finally making it possible for users to recover tabs and browser sessions. The lack of recovery capabilities was one of the critical shortcomings in Internet Explorer versions so far but, with IE8, it is now a thing of the past. Also, a big plus for IE8 is automatic recovery for crashed tabs, browser instances and sessions, providing a great continuity and workflow experience for users.
“The reliability improvements in IE8 Beta 2 are big. Crash recovery is nice, but not crashing is even better. Because in IE8 Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE) separates the frame (the address bar, back button, etc.) from the tabs, and the tabs (mostly) from each other, crashes are more contained and affect fewer tabs than before. We think users will also appreciate having close boxes on all their toolbars so that disabling ones they don’t want – while leaving the ones they do – is easier,” stated IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch.
9. Performance – while IE8 is not applauded as the apex of performance compared with rival browsers, Microsoft did indeed go deep under the hood of the product in order to deliver optimizations designed to make it fly. IE Program Manager Christian Stockwell explained that performance enhancements span from the underlining rendering engine, to JavaScript, JSON, networking, CSS, memory management, and scripting.
10. Security – when it comes down to security, IE8 kicks it up a notch compared with IE7. In the next iteration of Internet Explorer, Microsoft included features and capabilities such as: the SmartScreen filter, the Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) filter, Data execution prevention (DEP) (only on Vista SP1), Cross-document messaging, Cross-domain requests, Domain highlighting, Per-site ActiveX and Per-user ActiveX – all designed to bulletproof the browser as much as possible.
11. Privacy – Microsoft is without a doubt well ahead of the game in regard to user privacy, while Google is at the opposite pole. With Internet Explorer 8, the Redmond company introduced a range of enhancements set up to put users firmly in control of their information. The features available or expanded with this release include InPrivate Browsing, Delete Browsing History, InPrivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscriptions.
12. Compatibility - “IE8 is more interoperable with other web browsers and web standards. The contribution of CSS 2.1 test cases to the W3C is an important in order to really establish a standard way to assess standards support. We think that CSS 2.1 remains the most important place to deliver excellent interoperability between browsers. We think developers will enjoy the improvements to the built-in tools, as well as the other opportunities to integrate their sites in the user’s daily life with Accelerators and Web Slices,” stated Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle.
At the same time, IE8 Beta 2 sports the new Compatibility View feature. While IE8’s rendering engine has been configured by default to support modern web standards, the Redmond company is fighting to avoid breaking compatibility with legacy web content tailored exclusively for IE7 or IE6. This is where Compatibility View comes into play.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for download via this link.
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Written by Jason on September 1st, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Internet Explorer 8 is not the fastest browser in the universe. This, according to IE Program Manager, Christian Stockwell, working on the performance of the browser. However, this is not to say that the Redmond company has not poured a consistent amount of efforts into boosting the performance of IE7’s successor. In fact, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, planned for release by the end of this month, will offer palpable proof of the new horsepower under the browser’s hood.
“When we took a hard look at our goals and considered what we could do to build the best browser, we were presented with a quandary. On the one hand, we could focus very narrowly on scripting performance, trusting that our investment would noticeably improve our users’ browsing experience. Alternatively, we could invest more broadly in realistic scenarios, measuring heavily-used subsystems and investing our optimization effort accordingly. We opted for the latter approach,” Stockwell noted.
Even as early as March 2008, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch indicated that JavaScript performance was up 2.5 times, the Gmail inbox was loading 34% faster, the task of opening a new conversation took 45% less time, while that of opening a thread 25% less. With IE8 Beta 2, Microsoft has tweaked the execution time for the browser, but it has also managed to speed up navigation and user interaction.
In the end, Microsoft went well beyond JavaScript when it comes down to increasing the performance of the browser. In this context, improvements were introduced to scripting, memory management, networking, the rendering engine, and beyond.
“As part of our broader effort to improve performance in IE8, we did make large investments in JScript performance to make pages faster and to help developers be more productive. The JScript engine included with IE8 speeds up many common user scenarios. We have made huge improvements to widely-used JScript functionality including faster string, array, and lookup operations. We have also made changes to our core architecture to drastically reduce the cost of functions calls, object creation, and lookup patterns for variables scoped to the window or this objects,” Stockwell stated.
According to Microsoft, JavaScript performance in IE8 is with as much as 400% up from IE7. This percentage, while indeed impressive, pales next to the 700% JScript performance boost touted by compared with Mozilla for Firefox 3.1version 3.0.
The full code can be found in the TraceMonkey mercurial repository (the commit to merge TraceMonkey into Mozilla core is massive, clocking in at about 4MB).
If you want to try running your own copy of TraceMonkey on the command-line, just follow these steps:
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
cd tracemonkey/js/src
make -f Makefile.ref BUILD_OPT=1
Darwin_OPT.OBJ/js -j
(The above assumes that you already have Mercurial installed, and are trying to compile on OS X. Your milage may vary. The -j option is what enables jit-ing on the command-line.)
“The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date, we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. We have also worked hard to improve our heap fragmentation and memory usage on AJAX pages. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. Besides these great benefits to end users, our work in this area should take a significant burden off of developers,” Stockwell revealed.
At the same time, IE8 will be tailored to high speed bandwidth connections, being capable of handling more than its precursor. In this regard, Internet Explorer 8 will support a larger number of parallel connections compared with IE7, and will benefit from an advanced system designed to manage downloads accompanied by external scripts. But, in the end, Microsoft has also hammered away at the underlying rendering engine of the browser.
“By our upcoming Beta 2 we expect our standards mode engine to be at parity with our previous implementation for many sites. Going forward we will continue to invest in this area with the goal that when IE ships, developers do not have to make any difficult decisions: developing for our new engine will produce sites that work better across browsers and as an added bonus they will be faster too,” Stockwell promised.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available For Vista x86 here. or For Windows XP SP2 x86 here
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Written by Jason on August 29th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Add-ons are programs that add features to a web browser or change the way it works. If you’ve ever wished Internet Explorer could do something new or differently, chances are there’s an add-on out there that will fulfill your wish.
I must have tried out hundreds of add-ons over the years. In this column, I’ll talk about five add-ons that I use every day. They have all earned a place in my add-on stable because they really have made my online life easier, and I miss their presence when using somebody else’s computer.
Power users love IE7Pro
IE7Pro is a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7 that is indispensable to me in my day-to-day work. It adds a raft of new abilities to the web browser, including advanced management of tabbed browsing settings, a simple download manager, spelling checks of text you enter in web forms, autoscrolling of webpages, quick searching of page text, ad and Flash blocking, custom keyboard shortcuts, and much more.
One of my favorite features of this add-on is its ability to automatically refresh a tab at a specified interval. In my job as an IT coordinator, I use Internet Explorer to monitor several spam filters in my office. Unfortunately, none of the filters automatically refresh the browser to display the latest captured e-mail, so I was forced to manually refresh the webpages every so often. With IE7Pro, all I need to do is right-click the IE7Pro icon in the status bar, click Refresh Current Tab, and then pick my preferred refresh interval. This feature is also quite useful for seeing the latest messages coming into your web-based e-mail inbox and for keeping track of online auctions and message boards.
Do you want to search the Internet for something you’re reading about on a particular webpage? Instead of copying and pasting the text into a search box, simply select the word or phrase, right-click it, then click Search With to search for the term using Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, or another search engine of your choice. The results appear in a new tab.
Have you ever closed a tab by mistake? No worries click Tab History in the IE7Pro menu, and then click Reopen Last Closed Tab. Did Internet Explorer crash? IE7Pro will offer to restore the tabs that were open when the crash occurred.
Road warriors who frequently switch Internet connections will love IE7Pro’s proxy switcher. Instead of manually changing the proxy configuration each time you switch connections, you can quickly select previously used proxy servers from a menu.
I really haven’t done IE7Pro justice in this column. It offers far more than I have described above. To download it, go to the IE7Pro website.
Simple but effective: Find As You Type
To search for text on a webpage in Internet Explorer, normally you must press CTRL+F, type the search term into the Find window and then click Next. Find As You Type is an add-on that allows you to see all matches to your search term as it is typed. Matches are instantly highlighted on the page. If you type a combination of letters that does not appear on the page, an audio cue sounds and the Find box turns red.
For example, when I type “phish” into the toolbar, as in the screen capture below, all instances of “phish” on the page are immediately highlighted there is no need to click a button. You can step through each instance of matched text sequentially using the Next and Previous buttons on the toolbar. You can even set up Find As You Type to start searching as soon as you start typing on a webpage no CTRL+F required.
To download Find As You Type, go to the ookii.org website. Note that IE7Pro offers a very similar “instant find” feature. Therefore, if you choose to install IE7Pro, you don’t need to install Find As You Type. That being said, if you like the idea of enhanced searching and have no need for everything else IE7Pro offers, then Find As You Type is an excellent choice.
Organize your downloads with LeechGet
An Internet connection can be unreliable, and far too often I have felt the frustration that comes from having a large download interrupted. Restarting the download in Internet Explorer is hit-or-miss; sometimes I lose the partial download, and sometimes I don’t. I wanted a download manager that could take over from Internet Explorer and give me more control over what happens when things go wrong. My personal favorite is a product called LeechGet. It operates as a standalone program that integrates with Internet Explorer by managing downloads you click in the browser.
LeechGet allows you to manage multiple downloads, pause and resume, schedule downloads to occur at a particular time, and split your downloads into smaller “tasks.” You can also impose a “speed limit” on downloads that restricts how much bandwidth they can use, thus leaving you some bandwidth to browse the web. The program includes a download history and speed monitor.
LeechGet has two versions: a free version that limits you to one download at a time and does not include updates, and a paid version that removes those restrictions and includes technical support. To download it, go to the LeechGet website.
Make RSS shine with RikReader
Since the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its integrated RSS feed reader, I’ve become a very heavy user of RSS, and have subscribed to hundreds of different feeds (For more information about RSS feeds, see The wonderful world of RSS feeds).
As much as I enjoy the convenience of being able to detect, subscribe to, and read RSS feeds from within Internet Explorer, its feed reader has a couple of glaring deficiencies. First, there is no way to mark all feeds as read, which I like to do when I am very busy or behind on my reading. Second, there is no way to view all of my feeds at the same time. So I decided to find a feed reader that would take full advantage of the Windows RSS Platform. RikReader is my feed reader of choice. (Technically, RikReader is a program, rather than an add-on, but it integrates with the feed-subscription capabilities of Internet Explorer.)
RikReader displays the feeds you have subscribed to in Internet Explorer. It offers both a conventional two-pane view, with headlines on one side and article text on the other, and an impressive “newspaper” view that displays the full text of each article or blog post in a multicolumn layout. In either view, the text size can be easily reduced or enlarged via a slider. By typing a term in the search box, you can instantly filter a feed so that only articles containing that term are displayed.
If you have many feeds (in the hundreds), RikReader can be a bit slow to start up while it loads all of them. Things may also slow down when loading the newspaper view or when loading a feed with many hundreds of articles. In such circumstances, you can improve RikReader’s performance by setting it to display only unread articles.
RikReader is free and can be downloaded at the RikReader website. In lieu of charging a fee, the author promotes his Amazon.com wishlist, which makes for interesting reading.
Me.dium: An interaction revolution
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we love to interact with others online—hence the popularity of instant messaging, social networking sites, and online forums. In the end, though, web surfing has basically remained a solitary experience. We’ve always known that lots of other people are likely to be looking at the same page as we are, at the same time, but we couldn’t see or interact with them until now.
Me.dium is an add-on that allows you to peek behind the curtain of the web. After you install it, a Me.dium “map” appears in the left pane of the browser. The map displays an icon representing you and the website you are viewing, along with icons of other Me.dium users who are visiting the same site. Users you’ve added to your Me.dium friends list show up as yellow, and others show up as blue. Surrounding your icon are icons representing related sites that you or other Me.dium users have visited. For example, if you’re at a news site, Me.dium will show you other news sites; if you are at a bank’s website it will suggest other banking and financial sites. You can click an icon to go directly to that site.
It’s great fun to watch all of the activity revealed by Me.dium. Not only can you watch other Me.dium users as you and they move from site to site, you can also start a chat that every Me.dium user at the site can view and participate in. If a Me.dium user is on your friends list, you can begin instant messaging privately. Every message that you send includes a link to the site that you are currently viewing.
Be warned, though: Me.dium can be a real productivity sapper. As you interact with people and websites you might not have encountered otherwise, many hours may pass unnoticed. Also, while logged in to Me.dium, you may want to avoid visiting a site that may cause you embarrassment if revealed to your contacts. You may adore crocheting fluorescent-pink-and-yellow pillowcases, but some of your contacts might find your hobbies highly amusing. Fortunately, it only takes one click to turn off Me.dium, and sharing information with Me.dium is automatically disabled when you enter a secure site or a local intranet site.
To download this add-on, visit the Me.dium website.
Where do we go from here?
And there you have it; I’ve shown you how to add some very useful abilities to Internet Explorer. But the add-ons I’ve described here are only the tip of the iceberg. To browse hundreds more add-ons that can enhance your browser, visit the official Add-ons for Internet Explorer site.
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Written by Jason on August 28th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Its been several months now I have used Firefox 3 Beta on Ubuntu 8.04. On my windows PC I have Firefox 2.x.
With the latest version now being official I installed Firefox 3 in windows along side version 2.x just incase.
In other words, I choose the custom install option when installing Firefox 3 and installed it into a separate directory on my Windows PC so that it would not overwrite version 2.x . That way I could compare side by side the results , differences and speed. My main concern are the security vulnerabilities and the consumption of memory that Firefox has. Other than that everything else about Firefox is superior to other browsers I have tried in the past.
Below is a walkthrough reviewing my first experience with
Firefox 3 Final release.
This is an unbiased look at Firefox, although I must say overall Firefox still is my browser of choice.
Other Tips Users have watched
Written by PCWizKid on June 20th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Microsoft is nothing more than a simple spectator at Mozilla’s Firefox spectacle of releases. A new version of the open source browser is now available for download. Mozilla has delivered Firefox 2.0.0.10, a stability update announced as early as last week. Firefox 2.0.0.10 can be grabbed immediately via this link, but Mozilla will also serve the refresh via its update infrastructure, and in this sense, users will be alerted of the new build. With this release, Mozilla has plugged three security holes in the browser. A referer-spoofing via window.location race condition flaw, jar: URI scheme XSS hazard, and holes involving memory corruption are the vulnerabilities fixed with Firefox 2.0.0.10.
“As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download. (more…)
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Written by Jason on November 27th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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It does a number of very useful things to Internet Explorer 7.0:
1. Enhanced IE’s Tabbed Browsing
Too numerous to mention.
2. “Super drag & drop”
Open new links by dragging and dropping them on the page.
3. Mouse gesture support
Execute common tasks by drawing simple objects on the screen with your mouse.
4. Crash recovery
Automatically restored opened pages after a crash occurs. (more…)
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Written by Jason on November 17th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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While completely failing to breathe a single word on Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is still focused on the copy of the browser that originally shipped with Windows XP. In this context, the Redmond company announced that it is introducing an update to Internet Explorer 6 running on the 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, in order to alter the browser’s behavior when managing ActiveX controls.
The 18.9 MB update dubbed WindowsServer2003.WindowsXP-KB912945-x64-ENU.exe is up for grabs since November 13, 2007. “This update includes minor changes to how Internet Explorer handles some web pages that use Microsoft ActiveX controls. Certain webpages will require us