Internet explorer 8, Beta 2

The new browser from Microsoft is trying to catch the competition from behind, but it`s also coming with new functions.


Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft has now officially arrived at Beta 2 version, stage in which the new browser is considered almost ready from the point of view of its new functions.
As it was known even since the first beta version, lanced in March, one of the main changes from IE is the fact that is much more compatible with the web standards , chapter in which IE had to suffer. This change was so big that Microsoft expects that most of the existent web-sites not to be render properly with IE8 (including a lot of Microsoft`s web-sites).
Because of this, IE8 has a function that permits it to pass to the visualization mode of IE7 for this kind of web-site. For example, if a web-site seen with IE8 appear to be "broken", the person who use it can switch to IE7 mode by pressing a button, "broken page", which appears automatically in the address bar, in this situation. Also, the web-sites that are not prepared yet for IE8 can include a compatibility tag that tells the browser IE8 to visualize the page in IE7`s mode.
Some of the new functions of IE8 are already in the rival browsers for quite a time, but the new browser from Microsoft caught them from behind also trying to take them over with some things. In this way, IE8 will have an intelligent address bar, similar to Firefox`s 3 Awesome Bar, which can be used both to write the address, with auto-complete suggestions, and to search in the history and feeds of RSS.
The new IE allows you to return to the opened tabs before a crash and also gives you the possibility to reopen one of the last tabs closed by mistake. A very interesting function is that you can group the tabs on colors, so the tabs opened from a link of a web-page would have the same color as the one of the tab "mother", for a better identification of the pages connected somehow one to another. The tabs from the same group can be closed by a single action.
IE arrives with a new series of functions regarding the security and the insurance of the private intimacy of the users when they access the internet from another computer than their own. Microsoft introduce the term "InPrivate" which group this functions and which mean a way of "private" browsing through which the private information that involves browsing can not be accessible to other persons that uses the same browser. The first 3 functions of this kind are: InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscriptions.
InPrivate Browsing allows to avoid the stocking of information that regards the browsing, such as visited web-pages, cookies or other data. InPrivate Blocking is a function that reveals the tracking information used by the web-sites to folow its users and permits to block this data collectiong. InPrivate Subscriptions allows the users to subscribe to the permited or blocked web-sites in matter of data tracking. IE8 has a "InPrivate" button, situated in the left side of the address bar, which, once pressed, activates the InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking ways of navogation.
Two other new functions of IE8 are known already from the beta version- Webslices and Accelerators (first named Activities). Webslices is a combination between a web-site and a add-on, permiting the subscription to the content from certain web-sites and which it continously updates, like an RSS, but more complex. This slices require that the web-sites offer this function. Example of possible slices are that Wikipedia, for instance, to offer automatic additional information regarding a name found by the user in the same page, or Amazon to offer, also automatic, information related to a book found in the current web-site. Accelerators offer rapid access from any web-page to web-site and services often uses by the user.
It seems that the users who have Windowns XP SP3 installed on their computers may have certain problems with Beta 2 version of IE8.

This is all for the moment regarding the new browser from Microsoft. For those who are interested, the IE8 Beta 2 version can be downlanded from this web-site- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/, where you can also find more information.