Digital Home Thoughts: Internet Explorer 8 Being Released Later Tomorrow

"Today Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features, in direct response to people's increasing concerns about online safety. A new study shows: 91% of U.S. adults are concerned about online threats in the current economic climate and 78% are more likely to choose a web browser with built-in security."

I was in a conference call yesterday morning with James Pratt, the Senior Product Manager for Internet Explorer 8, and I have to say that as a die-hard Firefox user, I saw a lot of things in IE8 that I really liked. The first thing is stability - similar to Google's Chrome, each tab in Internet Explorer 8 is a unique software instance (process), so if one tab crashes, the others won't. Having experienced two Firefox crashes this week alone, that's a feature I wish Firefox had. Sure, Firefox will recover your tabs for you (usually) but that won't help bring back the content in those tabs (like a news post I was working on).

On the issue of speed, Internet Explorer 8 is faster on 48% of the top 25 sites than Firefox or Chrome. The list of "Top 25" sites includes the likes of Google.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com, Amazon.com, Apple.com and many others. I appreciate a synthetic benchmark as much as the next geek, but benchmarks aren't always realistic - and when we're talking about milliseconds, saying you're 200% faster doesn't mean much if both numbers are beyond the threshold of human visual comprehension. Of course, Google Chrome definitely has more "snap" than IE7 or Firefox, so overall speed does matter on some level - I'm looking forward to testing IE8 out to see how it feels in day to day use.

Pratt demonstrated a visual search function that was pretty slick - using Amazon as the search agent (the search box in the upper right corner) he typed "The Office" and results from Amazon appeared, complete with a product image and even the average customer rating. That's compelling stuff for me because I search Amazon for products all the time. Web Slices and Accelerators round out the offering, each having the potential to save a time for the user a few seconds at a time.

The biggest thing that IE8 still lacks? Spell check! It boggles the mind that Microsoft has never managed to add a spell check function - especially when users who already have Word installed have code on their computers that Microsoft could conceivably tap into. On some level I think it might be one of those things where Microsoft is worried that adding spell check will somehow eat into the sales of Microsoft Word - it's not a coincidence that WordPad doesn't have spell check, and that a default install of Windows Vista lacks any ability to spell check. I think this is one of those instances where Microsoft is paranoid about giving away spell check for free, lest it wound their cash cow that is Office - nevermind the fact that spell check comes included with Firefox. But I digress...

IE8 looks like something that no previous version of IE could really be said to be: a really great browser.