Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Well, one cool feature that is so far exclusive to IE8 is
the ability to colour the “tabs” of open browser windows according to
which page you opened them from. This helps you to visually group open
tabs and, at a glance, see which ones are related to each other. It’s a
feature other browsers should copy, pronto.
IE8 also better supports web standards, but
ironically, this means that some sites you open up with IE8 will look
“wrong”. This is because those sites had adjusted themselves to IE7’s
standards, and because IE8 chooses proper web standards by default, it
“breaks” web pages designed for earlier versions of IE.
Thankfully, there’s a simple “compatibility” button at the end of the
address bar – click this and the page will reload as though it were
being viewed in IE7, and balance will be restored unto the force of the
web. Over time, we should see less of these compatibility issues as
developers organise their sites to render properly in IE8.
The “Find on page” feature mimics that used in Firefox – no more
floating “find” boxes over your web page, something that was such a
throwback to an earlier era, but is now over.
Other features include a “private” browsing mode, and features such as “accelerators” which are like web enabled smart tags.
You can find out more of IE8’s features at Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer 8 pages
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/features/enhanced-navigation.aspx,
but all up, browsing the web in IE8 is a much more pleasant, more
Firefox-like experience.
Firefox 3 still seems faster, but IE8 hasn’t left the beta stage yet, so we can expect speed improvements to come.
As I’m attending Tech Ed 2008 in Australia over the next three days,
I’ll try to find out from Microsoft exactly when they plan to release,
but the new Beta 2 version is good enough for most web surfers to jump
right into and wade around the web in.
It took Microsoft years to get to IE7, but IE8 is coming along much
faster, and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised. If only Microsoft
would be as consistent in delivering good experiences, all Microsoft
users would be a lot happier!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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