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You might not notice a problem on your 30-inch widescreen LCD, but IE8’s thick interface is considerably “fatter” than alternatives, such as Chrome. IE8’s bulky interface really cuts down on the effective browsing window on netbooks.
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Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft
Free
www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer It’s fairly safe to say that if it wasn’t piggybacking on every copy of the best-selling operating system on the planet, Internet Explorer would be little more than a bad memory. Microsoft has been playing catch-up with Firefox and Opera for years, and now newer Webkit-based browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, have joined the rumble that routinely reduces the biggest kid on the block into a punchline.
Regardless, IE is an inevitable part of life for people who want to visit Web pages that specifically support it or who are locked into it by their workplace IT department. In fact, IE6, released in 2001, still commands 18.85% of the browser market as of February 2009, according to the most recent Net Applications Top Browser Share Trend report (marketshare.hitslink.com). Despite the rising popularity of Firefox and other alternative browsers, IE7 had 47.32% of the browser market that same month (with much smaller percentages of people using IE4, IE5, and IE8), meaning 67.44% of the people browsing the Web do so with one of Microsoft’s browsers. |
Anytime you see a green icon like this, you can add that element of a page to your Favorites bar as a dynamic Web Slice.
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The good news is that Microsoft seems to have applied the same philosophy to developing IE8 that the company used when creating Windows 7: Strip out the superfluous, optimize to cut down on system resource usage, and add core features that are actually useful instead of just chaff designed to bulk up marketing materials. There’s still a lot of work to do, especially in the face of all the free competition these days, but in some ways, IE8 is finally a viable challenger.
 Interface Ups & Downs
For all the new additions under the hood, the main interface for IE8 resembles that of IE7 and uses a lot of screen real estate out of the box. Instead of Chrome’s barebone elegance or Firefox’s insane level of painless customization, you get a thick stack of toolbars that can’t always be repositioned the way you want. This was bad enough on our desktop systems but entered the realm of ridiculous on a netbook also used for testing, where precisely 3 inches of the screen’s 4.5 inches of vertical space was available for the actual browser window. Compare this to Chrome’s default interface, which made 3.75 inches available for the browser window. That may not sound like much on paper, but for real-world browsing, it makes a world of difference. The interface for a default install of Firefox was comparable to that of IE8 in terms of size, but where you can bend the Firefox interface to your will, the IE8 interface is much more rigid.
On the bright side, IE8 handles tabs well enough now that the other browsers should shoot for a similar out-of-the-box experience. All tabs generated from a site are grouped and color-coded, making it easy to stay on topic or close all of the tabs in one group simultaneously. Clicking the New Tab icon opens a What Do You Want To Do Now page with links for starting an InPrivate session or accessing Accelerators (more on that stuff later), along with a handy Re-open Closed Tabs link that works just as the name suggests.
Most importantly, for the first time, all IE8 tabs are run as separate processes. When one goes down, it doesn’t bring all of the others with it. When crashes do happen, the browser can restore the session and even do so on a tab-by-tab basis for sites where you had a lot of tabs open before the crash. In many cases, if the tab that crashed contains form data you’ve already filled in, it also is restored with the tab.
Browsing Enhancements
IE8 has several key features that distinguish it from the pack, and Web Slices are the most interesting. These let Web developers package dynamic chunks of their site into “slices” that are accessed from the toolbar instead of forcing users to load the entire Web page. For example, the ESPN site has a page with Web Slices for major sports such as NFL and MLB, and adding them puts them on your Favorites bar where they are updated automatically throughout the day and can be viewed in a small window instead of making you return to the ESPN site to get the latest news. This is great for weather and similar information that changes constantly, and the only real downside is that clicking links within the Web Slice navigates to the related page instead of updating the Web Slice itself. For example, using an ESPN Web Slice lets you see headlines, but clicking Scores or any link within the slice opens the related page in a new browser tab.
Color-coded tabs should be hard-coded into every browser. |
Accelerators are another promising technology. They let you highlight a word or phrase on a page you’re viewing and feed it to one of several different external Web services for further processing, all without leaving the page. Good examples are translation Accelerators that let you highlight a phrase and use Google Translate or any other supported service to view the translation in a pop-up balloon instead of having to copy the text, navigate to the translation service, paste it in, translate it, and return to the page on which the text originally appeared.
Even the boring old search box gets interesting with IE8’s Instant Search Box and Visual Search options. The Search Box always defaults to the search provider of your choice but displays a list of icons for other search providers when clicked that let you easily switch without having to muck around in an options screen. Better still, search results can be fed directly into the search box, complete with images, so you can click them there instead of having to navigate to the search provider’s results page.
IE, Meet Security
Malware should also have a tougher time penetrating via IE8 than has been the case in the past. The DEP/NX (Data Execution Prevention/No-Execute) protection that was optional with IE7 is enabled by default in IE8. Other security features, such as XSS filtering designed to block a common malware attack vector, along with several improvements to ActiveX that help mitigate the damage it can do to the system, make IE8 more secure than IE7, and the integrated SmartScreen Filter is designed to block known malware attacks by checking files requested by the browser against a database. If the file comes from a malware distribution site that has been reported to Microsoft and entered in the database, SmartScreen prevents the download.
You’ve likely already heard of IE8’s so-called “porn mode,” officially dubbed InPrivate Browsing. Enabling this feature lets you browse Web sites that require cookies, but while the session is active, your history isn’t saved and all cookies and other tracks are deleted automatically when the session ends. Even the toolbars and extensions are disabled during an InPrivate session because they could potentially tap in to your browsing record and maintain a separate history. Firefox doesn’t have an equivalent to this baked into its code, and InPrivate is even a bit more thorough than Chrome’s Incognito private browsing tech. |
Highlight any text, and the blue Accelerator button helps feed it to a variety of Web services.
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InPrivate Filtering is a separate component that is often overlooked but can be used all the time and is therefore more useful than InPrivate Browsing. Turning it on prevents third-party Web sites from tracking your browsing behavior. This can prevent things you actually want to see, such as embedded videos, from being displayed, but it’s not difficult to manually adjust the settings to let content from certain third-party Web sites through.
Browsing In The Fast Lane
IE competitors love to tout the speed of their browsers, and for good reason. IE7 is slow and consumes far more resources than it should. IE8 is finally competitive in this regard, at least in subjective browsing tests.
IE8 launches in about the same amount of time from a cold boot as Firefox (between five and 10 seconds on our various test systems), although they both lag behind Chrome, which loads almost instantly. We ran IE8 through the Celtic Kane Online JavaScript Speed Tests (celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed.php), and the results were fairly disappointing. On average, Chrome was about twice as fast as Firefox (102ms vs. 161ms), and IE8 averaged a much slower 601ms.
Anyone who uses the Web knows that browsing performance goes well beyond benchmark and standards compliance tests. And in real-world browsing, IE8 performed admirably. Webkit-based browsers in general—and Chrome in particular—were still the snappiest on all of our test machines when it came to rendering pages, particularly those that rely heavily on JavaScript, but IE8 held its own against Firefox 3 in our subjective browsing tests. Most pages render quickly; more complex Web apps, such as Sumo Paint (sumopaint.com) work great; and the Web Slices, Accelerators, and Visual Search enhancements discussed earlier shouldn’t be overlooked when talking about overall browser speed. The ability to obtain vital, up-to-date information from Web pages without actually having to visit them cuts down on the number of tabs or windows you must manage. It has the potential to streamline browsing considerably. Yes, there are plenty of add-ons for Firefox that offer this and more, but it’s nice to have these kinds of touches as core features in a browser that practically everyone will have to use eventually.
IE8 requires more resources than IE7, thanks to its extra features and separate processes, and is competitive with Firefox in terms of memory usage, although Chrome trumps everything except IE7 in this category. We launched IE8, Firefox, and Chrome using a blank, locally stored text file in Windows XP and checked Task Manager to see how much memory each program used. IE7 opened one process that required 9,788KB. Firefox opened one process that used 29,008KB. Chrome opened two processes totaling 10,860KB. IE8 opened two processes that amounted to 13,384KB.
Next, we opened the same four tabs in each browser and recorded memory usage. IE7’s single process required 43,780KB, and Firefox’s single process ballooned to 54,440KB. IE8 opened five processes totaling 70,520KB, and Chrome opened six processes requiring a total of 49,428KB. It is interesting that Chrome runs leaner than all of today’s browsers despite the fact that each tab runs as a separate process.
Compatibility
IE8’s usefulness may depend on whether the add-on gallery fills up with useful stuff in the future.
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The IE8 team made some serious strides in making the latest version of the browser standards-compliant, and this focus also extends to the way the browser renders Web pages. By default, IE8's improved standards mode is always used, but developers can code their sites so that IE7's standards mode is used instead. Compatibility mode, which used to require a lot of manual selection when a site wouldn’t render properly in IE8, has also been revamped. Microsoft maintains a list of thousands of Web sites that look better in IE7 than they do in IE8, and the browser automatically reverts to IE7 compatibility mode when you access a site on the list.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
IE8 makes us wish you could perform blind taste tests for browsers the same way you do for sodas. Stripped of all the baggage accumulated by a combination of lackluster earlier versions of the browser and Microsoft’s catch-up approach to developing it, IE8 is actually a decent product. The Web Slices, Accelerators, and add-ons have already shown the potential to be useful tools for end users, but that potential will be fully realized only if the Web development and programming communities get onboard. At the time this article was written, the IE8 Add-Ons Gallery was so barren compared to the Firefox Add-Ons site that we expected to hear crickets chirping when it loaded. Here's hoping developers see this browser for what it is: a genuine attempt by Microsoft to innovate, address security issues, cut down on the bloat, and give IE8 users the same kinds of useful tools Firefox users have enjoyed for years. Until then, IE8 will languish in the limbo that exists between the Spartan interface and raw speed of Chrome and the sheer extensibility of Firefox.
by Tracy Baker
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