Today I decided to try out Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2) on a virtual machine running Windows XP. At first glance it looks just like IE7, but with a few more buttons and menues. The main new feature is probably that IE8 can suggest sites with relevant content to the ones you have recently visited by a click of a button.
You can also re-open tabs you have closed, sort of a new version of website history, which I think is very nice, as seen in the picture.
There is also a feature to use “InPrivate Browsing” which is browsing websites but not let IE save any data from the sites and share them with other sites, such as cookies, and the history will be deleted when you close the tab.
You can also select compatibility view to pages designed for older browser still will look OK, and there’s also a “smartscreen filter” that scans the websites for malicious content, and ofcourse all the old features of IE7 is all there what I could see. There are also these little helpful new things that sometimes really comes in handy, for example the “duplicate tab” option to open a new tab with the same URL as the current one.
I think that IE8 will be a very good browser, but the biggest leap forward was from version 6 to 7 with the introduction of tabs for IE, even though version 8 will improve it yet again. I like it.
