Do you know that the next version of Internet Explorer has just released from Microsoft? It’s Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. My friends told me to download and test IE8 because it has some new and cool features. I was so excited to download IE8 and tested it. Here are my comments.
User Interface (UI):
I was expecting a different UI of IE8. But what I’ve got is an UI with 90% the same with version 7. To be honest, I don’t like IE7 theme because it is too shiny. My rating for UI of IE8 is 3/5.
New Features:
Activities: as Microsoft described, “Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage.” To me, this new feature is just like a quick snapshot and/or lookup add-on. However, it is pretty much convenient because you don’t have to do the traditional copy & paste job anymore. The activities are still limited to Microsoft’s pre-defined functions. It would be great if we can customize those activities. The below pictures are my test with activities feature of IE8. You can download activities demo movie here.
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WebSlices: an enhanced version of traditional bookmarks/favorites. While traditional bookmarks/favorites can only give you a list of web addresses, WebSlices feature will open a snapshot of bookmark address at the time you move your mouse pointer to the link. By that way, you don’t need to go to those addresses, but still know what’s going on with them. Unfortunately, after installing IE8, the WebSlices feature didn’t work on my computer. Please tell me if it works on yours. You can download WebSlices demo movie here.
Developer Tools: this feature will be very tasteful for Web developers. IE8 provides tools that you can analyze, debug, and visualize your websites more accurately. This feature is so convenient to my point of view. However, I wonder if it can directly debug our websites on the servers. Take a look at the below picture or you can download developer tool demo here.
AJAX navigation: This feature is not really necessary to me. All it can do is going back and forth the zoom level of the AJAX map of Microsoft. Period. You can download AJAX Navigation demo movie here for better understanding about what I’ve mentioned.
ERRORs
Obviously! Because this is just a Beta 1 (testing) version, it still have (many) bugs inside. The first time I opened it, I got crash after 15 minutes of use. This forced me to do the same job, Ctrl+Alt+Del, to terminate the program. I did check the support website for IE8 errors, omg, I didn’t even want to look at it. Here is my IE8 crash picture. Be careful when using it.
Conclusion
Microsoft calls IE8 is a new version of IE, it however doesn’t have enough completely new features to be called IE8. It is good if you use IE8 as your secondary web broswer and for testing purpose at this moment (my suggestion). It looks like we won’t have a big surprise with Internet Explorer version 8 Beta 1. Let’s wait for the official IE8 in June 2008. If you want to have a test with IE8, go and download IE8 Beta 1 here.
