I really like Mozilla Firefox compared to Internet Explorer as my browser. I find it fast and reliable. But when I checked on the STATPRESS of this blog, I found out that the top users who visited my site uses IE7 and IE6 as their browsers and Firefox 3 and 2 falls only on the 3rd and 4th frequently used browsers of my visitor. With this on my statistics, I decided to try the new version of Internet Explorer which is the IE8 beta.

Installing IE8 Beta

So I downloaded and installed it to my PC. It took only about 5 minutes or less to finish the installation process of the new browser from Microsoft. To try it, I made this blog post using the said browser. They really made a great change on the new browser because my blog loads fast. The problem that I encountered is when i get inside the “Create New Post” of WP. The Title textbox did not display correctly but it is just a minor flaw. The div style used for the textbox might not be correctly set to work well on IE8.

You will see from the picture below the appearance of the “New Tab” window.

IE8 After Install

It displays the new features of the browser such as the Reopen Closed tabs, Start InPrivate Browsing and Use an Accelerator. The “Reopen Closed tabs” feature shows previously surfed and closed websites. The InPrivate Browsing feature on the other hand is like the Incognito feature of Google Chrome that allows you to surf the web in “Secret Mode”. In this browsing mode, any traces of evidence that you visited a site such as web history and cookies are not saved, giving you a private and safe browsing. Aside from these features shown on “New Tab”, IE8 also brags about how it becomes faster and safer compared to the previous version. It says that they improve IE8 scripting engine to handle AJAX making the browser much faster in dealing with Javascript / AJAX based webpages. I am still testing the said browser and I will just update this post if I find something interesting about it.

Now, if you wish to know more about the other features of IE8 Beta 2, just visit IE8’s official website at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx.