Three things I love about IE8 (as a technician)

by Lee Mathews on July 29, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Since I just (and I mean just) finished reformatting and installing the Windows 7 RTM on my desktop at work, I figured I'd leave things be and use Internet Explorer 8 for the rest of the day. Truth be told, it's a capable browser and works just fine for the majority of my web-based tasks.

Plus, I've gained a bit of respect in the past couple weeks from what I've been able to do on my workbench as a result of customers installing IE8. There are a few features that I really appreciate when I'm trying to fix someone's bogged down, beaten-up Windows install.

Improved speed

No, it's definitely not as fast as Chrome or Safari, but IE8 is definitely faster than previous versions. Since it's the browser I'm fighting with all day long as I undo customer "accidents," I'm glad performance has been improved.

InPrivate

Even though I'm just using IE to download certain tools or test functionality, I still don't want to leave tracks on my customer's computers. InPrivate makes it easy for me to be discreet.

Managing Add-ons

Easily one of the most helpful features. When I disable something like MyWebSearch, IE8 takes a look around for additional components that appear to be related and offers to disable them for me. It helps to quickly clean up lots of common browser annoyances I encounter.

Internet Explorer 8 might not be perfect, but I'm much, much happier to find it installed on someone's PC than, say version 6.

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Comments

tyraxJul 29th 2009 11:32AM

Highly Ranked

I'm pretty happy will IE8 as well. I still have Firefox installed, but when I started playing with the Win7 RC I just kept using IE8 as my default browser. When I found a way to turn the inprivate feature as an ad blocker, I lost my main reason for using Firefox.

Dislike

216Jul 29th 2009 11:42AM

Neutral

IE8 is definitely a much better default than IE6, but I still wouldn't replace Chrome/FF with it. Altho when people refuse to use FF I always make sure IE8 is installed on their PC anyway (so they use it without even knowing it)

KamalJul 29th 2009 11:53AM

Not to mention the built in developer tools and javascript debugger. Press F12 to get started. It is great!

The accelerators have a lot of potential althought mostly just use the "Search with..." feature.

ZeRoAug 19th 2009 12:05AM

Thats exactlly what i was gonna say!

MattJul 29th 2009 12:11PM

Hurm. I, too, am happy that IE is no longer a joke, but I can't muster much enthusiasm for it finally being, apparently, 'almost as good' as any of the programs it's competing against.

It's great in the sense that people who don't know any better* finally won't make life miserable for their tech support and the web design community, but it's not exactly putting stars in my eyes. So, a 'thanks' to Microsoft for making the default option tolerable, but they haven't earned a 'bravo' yet.

* And, of course, the people who choose to use it. It's also great that choosing to use IE can finally be a legitimate option, instead of simply bonkers.

RobertJul 30th 2009 12:27PM

I wouldn't say it's not a joke anymore, it's just a little less funny now.

turuJul 29th 2009 1:43PM

Multiple tab processes !
Never see it works on Gecko based browser, and therefore I was surprised to see how it works by using IE8. it's actually cool B)

turuJul 29th 2009 1:46PM

"Not to mention the built in developer tools and javascript debugger. Press F12 to get started. "

omg, i didn't know that IE8 have these functions as default. yes, it's great !

KamalAug 8th 2009 3:20AM

Here is a great video about using the developer toolbar. It is short on details but highlights the features so one can go play and discover all the possibilities.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/toolshed/ToolShed-Tooltip-19-IE-8-Developer-Tools-saves-the-day-and-time/

Drew GreenJul 29th 2009 2:16PM

IE8 seems pretty good (we rolled it out at the office a few weeks ago), but the one thing that bugs me is the tabbed browsing. It always seems to have a slight delay when opening a link in a new tab. I wonder if that's because it needs to start a new process for the new tab. Any thoughts?

turuJul 29th 2009 4:26PM

Do you face same problem while using Chrome (the another browser which has same multi session ability ) ? then maybe it is...

but I feel like I had same problem even when I use IE7 (the one w/o multi session).

Drew GreenJul 29th 2009 4:29PM

No, Chrome does not have this issue. And I agree with you that IE7 seemed to have the problem, too. Not sure what's causing it.

n0rJul 30th 2009 1:37PM

I have the same tab delay issue as well. That plus the "click" sound annoys me enough to dont use IE. But apart from those annoyances IE8 is actually decent.