When Mozilla launched Firefox 3 there were some people who weren’t fond of the changes they made to the address bar. With it they decided to intermingle results from the user’s history, bookmarks, and typed addresses to provide a long list of sites they might be trying to find. While not everyone liked the feature there were quite a few who did, and among those people the name “Awesome Bar” caught on.
Well, the download for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was just posted, and it is sporting an “Awesome Bar” that is even more powerful than Firefox’s. The screenshot above shows how it grabs results from your history, favorites, and also from any feeds you’ve subscribed to within IE. All of the different types of results are divided up so that the user can quickly determine what’s what, which was often a complaint with how Mozilla decided to implement their solution. If you see a result that you want to delete just hover over it, and a red “X” should appear at the end.
One of my new favorite things would also have to be the colorized tabs. When you Control+Click on a link from a site the new tab will not only open next to the current one, but it will also inherit the same color. That way you can visually associate tabs with each other.
And lastly when you open a new tab Internet Explorer 8 will ask whether you want to do things like open a tab you accidentally closed, use an accelerator, or start browsing privately:
I have to give Microsoft a lot of credit for what they’ve done here. I was thinking that the only new feature we were going to see in IE8 Beta 2 was the InPrivate Browsing that we previously covered. They definitely shocked me with the other features they added, and they did a really great job with them. I can’t wait to see what the final release is like.
Get Internet Explorer 8 for Windows
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
I’m an avid Firefox user and only use IE when I absolutely have to. Having said that, I am a little excited about IE 8 given all of these cool features. CNET has a screenshot gallery that talks about some of the things mentioned and some things not mentioned. Go to [news.cnet.com] to check out out. IE 8 will also have a feature that if a website causes an error, it will only shut down the one tab rather than the entire browser. That is awesome considering Firefox 3.0.1 has crashed a few times and the whole thing goes down. We’ll just have to see if everything works as advertised. Kudos to Microsoft if it does.
So even the sleeping giant couldn’t resist the awesome bar…haha! I love the awesome bar, I don’t know how I ever surfed the web without one.
So far the things they’ve added work pretty well on my system. And the crashing thing you pointed out is pretty nice where it won’t crash the entire browser, but now I’ll have to find a site to crash it.
I have to say I am impressed. All the new features look really useful to me: accelerators, webslices, improved tabinterface (incl. the colorized tabs), inprivate blocking, smartscreen filter, activex security improvements, better crash handling, following the web standards properly (finally, though still a bit behind the pack), and the built in improved developer tools. I really like their version of the awesomebar too – clean and clear. Kudos to the team, finally a good IE version again.
I just hope they can do some more about the speed as it’s quite slow here. And of course it would be nice if some Fx extensions could copy some of their great ideas
Who knows, they could very well be in the pipeline. Mozilla guys can smell success in the air.
My guess is that they are done with adding new features, and that their focus now will be on bug fixes and performance improvements. So it should get better before the final release.
I realize that this is a beta, and that not everything can be expected to work properly, but this seems excessively buggy. For instance, if I click on a link, I will not be taken to that page. Instead, IE will notify me that it cannot load the page. This is easily corrected by refreshing, but it gets annoying as you have to do this every time you click on a link. Also, my friend uses Yahoo! Mail Classic (for whatever reason), and I told him to upgrade to IE8. He did, and it broke his mail. I then told him to add the site to the compatibility mode list, but the spellcheck still didn’t work. Again, I know this is a beta, but isn’t it supposed to be for consumer use? You’d expect that they wouldn’t release a browser for consumer use, even if it’s a beta, with such obvious bugs.
I know the last release was targeted at developers, but I wouldn’t say this release is targeted at consumers since it’s not something they’re really advertising on their home page. Even Mozilla’s Beta’s had some pretty obvious bugs in them though.
I find IE8 faster and much improved. I have tried all browsers and still find IE easier and as safe if not safer. I know FX users will totally disagree but I have tried every version of FX and find it slow and cumbersome. The battle between IE and FX is like PC to Apple. Some things fit better depending on the user. I have had no crashes and love all the new features. I think it always goes back to the user and how much you know about the web and your computer…..