Having installed and reviewed Google Chrome it might be interesting to check out Microsoft's new release of Microsoft IE 8 and see how it compares with Chrome and Firefox. I installed IE 8 on the Acer Aspire One first and noticed there are some new features. I'll take a look at these new features and make some comments.

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According to the Microsoft IE 8 Home Page, here are the new features found in IE8:

  • Accelerators enhance your ability to work with text that you select on a webpage, enabling you to map addresses, define words, and more.
  • Compatibility View: This says IE 8 is new and some websites might not be ready. Enabling Compatibility view will display the site as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes.
  • Enhanced Tabbed Browsing: When one tab is opened from another, the new tab is placed next to the originating tab and color coded, so that you can quickly see which tabs have related content. If you close a tab that's part of a group, another tab from the same group is displayed, enabling you to remain within the context of the current task rather than suddenly looking at an unrelated site.
  • Better Find On Page: Activated by Ctrl-F, a search box is activated below the toolbar. Instead of waiting for you to type an entire search term and hit Enter, the toolbar searches character-by-character as you type. Matches are highlighted in yellow on the page so that they're easy to identify.
  • Smarter Address Bar: Typing a few characters searches across your History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds, displaying matches from the website address or any part of the URL.
  • Browse with In Private: Start InPrivate Browsing and your browsing activities, history and cookies are not retained, and third party web content providers may be hindered from tracking your online activities without your consent.
  • Redesigned New Tab page
  • Reopen closed tabs
  • Reopen your last browsing session
  • Improved Zoom
  • A better back button
  • Increased performance
  • Improved favorites and history management
  • Instant search
  • Web Slices enable users to subscribe to specially marked content on a Web page. When the content changes, the user receives a notification on the Favorites bar where the content can be previewed without additional navigation.

Well I guess we need to look at what some of these features are all about... in no particular order:

Increased Performance: According to the IE8 Performance Test video, when comparing IE8 against Google Chrome and Firefox in loading the top 25 websites; IE 8 loads faster on 5 of the top 10 and 12 of the top 25 sites, three times as many as Firefox (3.05) and one-third more than Chrome (1.0). Well, I don't have any way to measure speed the way they are showing on the video. So how is this for scientific.... on my virtual XP I have a fresh install of Google Chrome (3.0.154.53), IE8 (8.0.6001.18702), and Firefox (32b3). I typed yahoo.com in the address box, hit enter and started counting one-thousand one..... IE8 finished at 23, Chrome at 63, and Firefox 21. Ok, then I tried bloggajim.com using the same procedure. IE8 - 23, Chrome - 226, and Firefox - 60. It seems to take a long time to load the stuff from Amazon as well as the site statistics stuff. Ok, I don't have any way of knowing how the Internet is responding at any particular instant so I don't know. Comparing load speed on my Acer, Google Chrome is up and running and ready to go on a count of three while IE8 takes a count of 5. Why is it when you configure IE to startup with a blank page it always takes a few seconds to load the blank page? I don't have Firefox loaded on the Acer so I can't say what it takes. Remember the Task Manager in Google Chrome. The Stats for Nerds opens up a page which shows memory usage for all open browsers (you can do the same thing by typing the URL about:memory). The Results show IE 8 is the clear winner as far as using the most memory.

All right then, I noticed when I opened bloggajim.com in IE8 the Compatibility mode icon was flagged. So I clicked on it and a flag came up over the tab saying it was now displaying using Compatibility mode. I didn't see a difference in the way it displayed the page...

On the surface, Web Slices appear to be a pretty cool feature. As it turns out, the web page has to be configured (See MSDN Web Slice Format Specification - Version 0.9 )to incorporate Web Slices in order to IE 8 to utilize this new feature. After sites are upgraded this may turn out to be pretty handy. It checks for updates to a site and then throws an alert if it senses a change.

From what I can see the IE8's InPrivate Browsing (Ctrl-Shift-P) works the same as Chrome's Incognito mode (Ctrl-Shift-N).

The "Better Find on Page" looks like it works the same as the Page Find feature in Fire Fox. Well, actually the one in IE8 displays how many matches it has found.

Looking at the "Enhanced Tab Browsing", opening a new tab to the right of the current tab is useful, Firefox opens a new tab at the far right (for me it may be way far right), and Chrome also opens a new tab to the right of the current tab. Ok, actually, IE8 opens a new tab to the right of the "Group" of tabs not to the right of the current tab. All of the tabs in a group has the same color. Color coding the tab is useful in grouping what tabs at least came from the same parent page.

So, I guess I don't really have a definite opinion as to which browser is the best. I really like the way Chrome can save a page as an application which will open up looking like a application not a browser window. Some things that I open, my interface for bloggajim.com for example works really well as a Chrome application. The Web Slice is a good idea... being able to flag a part of a page as an item of interest and being able to monitor that item for changes. Microsoft has placed the Web Slice Format Specification in the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication which, if I am reading this correctly, enables other browsers to use this capability. So it is just a matter of web developers adding the code to their web pages. Firefox 3.1 will be coming out soon (the beta version is already available for download). I haven't written about the new features in Firefox 3.1, but they are very similar to what I have found in IE8 and Google Chrome.

Web Developer information for IE 8 may be found on the MSDN Developer Information Index for Internet Explorer 8 page.

PS - If you are a web developer you are going to probably need the Web Developer Information for IE 8 as it definitely messes up the display of some pages. I don't know why Microsoft has to be different.... maybe they feel entitled or something.

Tags: browser, ie8, internet explorer 8

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