IE 8

IE 8 beta 2 has been available for download for some time now. i tried it today. seemed to me more of a child born out of a marriage between firefox and flock.

accelerators let you utilise the power of the web without copy-pasting across tabs. so you have encarta, maps, live search etc built into the context menu. there are addons in firefox that give the same functionality. only here you have everything pre-built.

instant search is basically a built-in suggest feature. i think it will be annoying. i've turned off suggest in firefox. i hate those drop-down lists that appear for every thing i search. and visual search is more like yahoo glue.

web slices seems to be a nice thing. but it's success depends on how exactly the browser selects which pages are capable of web slices. and which sites it supports. it seems the support for web slice will have to be built by the site designer. and it is said that it's inspired by the web clip feature of safari (i've never used safari)

tab grouping seems to be an interesting thing to do. with an option to close the group at once or refresh the tabs.

inPrivate browsing has been termed as porn browsing. but i think it's a good feature, particularly for people using public computers.

the smart screen is a direct copy from firefox 3. even the wording is almost the same. but i liked the domain highlighting feature.

smart address bar is again a copy from firefox 3. only, in IE it takes just a fraction of a second more to load.

searching on page has become a bit better with highlighting and no annoying floating boxes. but i still don't know why they can't have find-as-you-type.

the tabs are now individual processes or something like that. so that if a tab crashes, it doesn't affect the other. i don't know what it will do to the memory consumption, the only advantage IE has over firefox.

by default, all web slices and many other things will keep on updating themselves even though IE might not be running. dunno how many people really want this to happen. on my part, i hate processes that run by themselves in the background (not the system ones, of course :P)

but this is still beta. though i don't think there will be any major changes.