It's hard to believe it was way back in July of last year that we pondered how Internet Explorer 8 would affect your GrandView experience. Now that IE8 actually HAS been released (though not through Windows Update yet), we're happy to say our verdict now is the same as it was in our initial testing back then: everything's fine.
Our biggest initial concern was that IE8 would be standards-compliant by default, adhering to specific rules defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in an effort to have all web pages display the same in all browsers. This type of consistency is a great triumph for developers and the Internet community but could have been detrimental to our application, which still has a number of pages that do not conform to specific web standards. If IE8 only rendered standards-compliant pages we might have some quick tweaking to do; but fortunately it is still capable of rendering non-standard content and can automatically switch to a Compatibility View mode if it detects that a page has been specifically designed for a previous version of Internet Explorer. In such cases, the broken-page icon to the right of the address bar would be highlighted to indicate that the page is being displayed in Compatibility View mode.
Broken-display concerns alleviated, the good news is that you don't have to do anything to start using Internet Explorer 8 with GrandView. In fact, initial testing indicates that IE8 results in a slight speed boost over IE7, and the following enhancements suggest reasons you may want to start using IE8.
- Improved Security/Privacy:
IE8 touts malware protection and an improved phishing filter (now called SmartScreen) that warns when you visit a site known to harbor malware. The new InPrivate Browsing feature deletes all history, data, temp files, and cookies when closing the browser. The new InPrivate Filtering feature lets you block a site you're visiting from sending info to third-party sites (click the lock/arrow icon in the status bar to enable/disable). Common cross-site-scripting attacks and malicious ActiveX controls are also blocked. Finally, IE8 provides a way to delete all cookies except for sites in your Favorites list, a great alternative to simply deleting all cookies in IE7.
- Better Tabbed Browsing:
Tabs are now organized in colored groups based on how they're launched (see sccreenshot above), and it's possible to close all tabs in a group or close all except the group via the tab's right-click menu. Right-click on a tab to reopen a previously closed tab. If a page on a tab crashes, only the tab (not the entire browser) is closed.
- Enhanced Address Bar:
The address bar can now function as a search box to search using your default search provider. It also looks for entered text in recent URLs and site titles to show a filtered list of your matching Favorites, History items, and RSS feeds. When viewing a site, the address bar now highlights the domain, with the rest of the URL grayed out, so you know for sure which primary site you're visiting (e.g. the site http://paypal.fakesite.com would have "fakesite.com" highlighted).
- New Accelerators and WebSlices:
Accelerators work somewhat like mini-applications, allowing you to perform some action when text on a web page is highlighted. They allow you to do useful tasks such as map a location when an address is highlighted or translate the selected text. The nice thing about Accelerators is that they pop up the map/translation/etc. directly in a small pop-up so you don't have to navigate to another page. WebSlices allow you to subscribe to specific content on a page, such as a stock ticker that updates frequently, so you can access the updated content directly from your Favorites bar. Unfortunately only a few Accelerators and WebSlices are available at this time.
This list simply highlights some features of the new Internet Explorer 8 web browser. For more detailed information, check out PC World's complete review. IE8 is currently only available from Microsoft's website but reports indicate it will be released to all users on Windows Update the week of April 13th and will be available as an automatic update as early as April 27th.
Jeromie L. Walters
GrandView Business Solutions Developer