Internet Explorer-8

When it comes to Internet browsing Mozilla Firefox is the dominant force. Mostly because almost every new feature usually first appears in Firefox and then in others. It has some amazing features and add-ones that simply rock. Your browsing experience gets a whole new turn and you feel much more fun and joy. Usually these features seem to be more prominent in office rather than at home because you are much busier in office. I was, I am and will always be a great fan of Firefox because it's a love lost for me. My IT department says that you can only use Microsoft products on your PC because they are safe. Highly arguable point especially when it comes to choosing between Firefox and IE. When they first time removed Firefox I got annoyed and felt like in no man's land. I missed a lot of things among which the most important was off-course tabs. To get tabs I downloaded Internet Explorer 7 and installed it and uninstalled it after three hours. I don't know what extra features it provides but it simply fails in providing the most basic service I.e. Fast Browsing. It can't even handle Oracle Applications that run through JInitiator. I am not a fan of Java but all I know is that it has no problems with IE-6 but I tried all the things that I knew but failed to make it run on IE-7. Where is Internet Explorer-8 (topic)?

For two months I used IE-6 without any liking and disliking until one day I saw Internet Explorer-8 beta download on Microsoft website. It must be tabbed so I just jumped to it. After using it for a little while I came to realize that it has same problem while running JInitiator. For my amazement and pleasure there was a solution for the problem. The name of the solution is Compatibility View. To understand it first we need to know that what Microsoft was doing before IE-8 and what they have changed in IE-8.

The biggest complain about IE for many years was, it is not adherent to the W3C standards. So the websites designed according to W3C standards displayed shabby in IE and websites were need to designed separately for IE to target the audience that use Microsoft and IE. Starting from IE-8 Microsoft has finally changed the scheme of things; IE-8 is completely adherent to the W3C standards. Done, but what about the websites that were designed specifically for IE? Those websites will run OK on prior releases of IE but will not run properly on IE-8. This is where Compatibility View comes into play. You can turn on Compatibility View for a website that does not display well on IE-8 and IE-8 will display the website to its best using Compatibility View. You had to do this only once and after that IE-8 will recognize it automatically. So that's it I turned on Compatibility View for JInitiator websites and now they work fine until I try to close them; they never get close gracefully and you had to use Task Manager's kill process weapon. Can't figure out why this is happening.

Another very interesting feature of IE-8 is Suggested Sites. Turn Suggested Sites on to get a list of websites that are related to your current browsing session. Another one is that you can bookmark a page as well as individual paragraphs and lines inside a page. Another one is tab colors. The related tabs (a tab opened from a link in another tab) are colored same. It helps a lot in tab tracking. I think these features are new and others will be following it soon. Furthermore IE-8 now saves a session for you if you accidently lost the session due to power outage and gives you the option of reopening it next you start IE (similar to one in Firefox). And last but not in any mean least is that it is light in use while you are switching between tabs unlike its predecessor i.e. IE-7.