It’s been nearly a year since we first heard of Microsoft and its IE 8 browser. And finally after all these months of Beta testing the browser is now live for public use. Internet Explorer 8 is available as a free download on Microsoft’s Web site to licensed Microsoft operating system users. IE8 will run on computers with Windows Vista as well as Windows XP.
The browser has 3 new features compared to IE7:
Accelerators – Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.
Web Slices – Web Slices makes information from dynamic/ constantly updated sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web.
Visual search suggestions – The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time.
As one can see most of these apparent new features are something more experienced web users like us have seen with Firefox, Opera, Chrome et al. These changes if at all might seem significant only for those majority of users still stuck in IE6 world. And for them to know about IE 8 Microsoft is using social media to spread the word.
It also seems that Microsoft isn’t targetting any of the other browser users at all. For IE8 like its near predecessor doesn’t have a mac version and isn’t seemingly competing with Safari anymore. The features that are being projected as USPs are old functions in Firefox, so certainly they haven’t taken any pains to even intrigue Firefox users. Chrome with just a percent of world users perhaps isn’t on their thoughts at the moment anyway.
On one hand this might seem as a lacklusture performance from the IE team and microsoft in general for the above reasons. But on the other I consider it a smart and efficient move, whereby they have significantly enhanced on IE7 and made just enough changes to encourage IE6 users to shift to IE8 and also promoting it in the right manner for people to make this shift. It is easy to understand that people who use IE don’t do it for the love of it but because it is standard with Windows and until knowledge sheds light on them they don’t know of any other browsers. Such a market also tends to be what I call the default setting republic. That is they tend to be the kind of users who use the default settings of a browser because either they are scared of tehnology enough not to make any changes or just don’t bother about the complications of customization.
Now for Microsoft, this means a set of users who will use their default Live search tool on the browser, and quite frankly that is where the money lies for Microsoft to crank up new and better browsers time and again. It is not a far fetched thought if they believe Mac users to be slightly more advanced in terms of browser settings, and the same case being with users of Firefox, Opera and Chrome, for surely if they can find about other browsers, download and install them, they are sure to change their settings to their preference, where MS Live doesn’t favor the odds. So the best way, make a more efficient system and not target any of those who won’t bother building your business. So when bloggers say this one won’t switch back the switchers, perhaps Microsoft isn’t bothered about the switchers for obvious reasons.
And yes, for all the horniness that we subdue online, like Chrome’s incognito mode even IE 8 has a inPrivate browsing mode for reasons that you very well know now. 
Famed browser? You got to be kidding
IE 5 changed browsing for a lot of people before FF or any other came on the scene.. and IE still holds 67% of the market share and for many people browser still equals IE .. therefore it is a famed browser… for all its lapses you can’t take away these facts from IE…
from the article is seems people with options would opt out of IE and go for FF. it sounds that stupid people use IE.
I think the following:
1. for developers, IE targetting is required due to wide spread use of the browser
2. In a corporate environment, IE offers a great deal of control via Group policy settings that other browsers don’t
3. FF has its own share of problems with memory leaks and stuff
3. IE 8 is not as bad as it is made out to be.
People who are interested in seeing for themselves the way things stand, take the “Naked Browser” Challenge: http://www.merawindows.com/SpreadIE8/NakedBrowserChallenge/tabid/471/Default.aspx
Internet Explorer 8 is very good because it is as stable as Opera. I hate the previous versions of IE like IE6 because it hangs frequently. ‘