for when you have no internet…

I believe Internet Explorer can finally be given the title ‘web browser’.

It’s hard to believe those words came out of my mouth. I have always hated Internet Explorer, and although my love for Firefox has grown so strong that I won’t ever think of touching any other web brower again except for software updates and for testing purposes, I had decided to start clean with this version of Internet Explorer since it promised so much. WOW is all I can say.

I only discovered the update during one of my routine update-my-entire-computer rampages. The installation screen was very similar to, if not the same as, Internet Explorer 7. It also took roughly the same time to install (30mins or thereabouts) – Microsoft evidently still don’t have a soft spot for people like me who may not be running on 4GB RAM and a 3GHz processor.

As with any Windows update, I began receiving those annoying ‘RESTART YOUR COMPUTER NOW OR ELSE’ popups – regardless of the fact that I’ve applied the registry tweak to disable auto-restart. Since I wanted to check it out and it didn’t work until a restart, I hesitantly restarted to be able to experience the beauty of Internet Explorer 8.

Before I even opened the browser I noticed something was wrong – and sure enough, in my system tray, my Intel Pro/SET Wireless tray icon was nowhere to be found. My Internet worked fine, though. This has never happened before – strange.

Now let’s get into the actual browsing experience…

Click to view full-sized screenshot:

Above are my first few moments of Internet Explorer 8 – and those were enough for me. As with most browser upgrades (Firefox included), I was greeted with a nice ‘Welcome to Internet Explorer 8′ page – which I chose to ignore because I wanted to discover the beauty of IE8 myself.

Review time:

The initial startup prompted a quick setup, which I thought was nice. Just as well I didn’t rush through this because the ‘express setup’ involved Internet Explorer sneakily being set as your default browser – thanks, but no thanks Microsoft.

I exited and restarted IE8 a few times after that to get a feel of its speed and I’m glad to say it starts up almost instantaneously. With IE7 I could go make myself a cup of coffee and it still wouldn’t be done.

At first glance it looks exactly like IE7 minus a few cosmetic changes – that horrible toolbar-which-isn’t-really-a-toolbar is still there – beats me why they think it ’slims down’ their browser, because that’s the most time-consuming and annoying thing I’ve ever seen. Do they really expect me to remember what goes under each menu-icon?

Apparently IE8 is trying to break through to the plugins market because unlike IE7, I now found a ‘X’ next to my Adobe Acrobat toolbar – IE8 recognises this as a plugin and allows you to remove it, which I think is nice. Might actually compensate for the rest of the crap I don’t need at the top of the window and I might be able to see more webpage than toolbar… Anyways, there’s even an IE8 addons website now… although it will never catch up to Firefox’s millions of plugins…

When you open a new tab now, you’re given the about:Tabs page by default now. It’s something like Google Chrome’s homepage: you’re given a list of your recently-visited websites, and links to change your accelerators etc.

I really think IE8 is playing catchup here – although it’s big-time unlike IE7, which was just a joke. Standards compliance, something which resembles the Firefox AwesomeBar, private browsing modes and addons are features which other browsers have had for eons.

Let me expand on the first point: standards compliance. This is Internet Explorer at its best: the only web browser for which developers are FORCED TO include exceptions if they want it to work at all. It’s nice to hear that IE8 is standards-compliant – but what happens to the billions of websites with IE ‘if’ statements? Hmm… I’m glad to report bthaxor.com works very fine though

Here’s another thing I was surprised to find in IE8: a menu option called ‘Developer’s Tools’. Naturally I was quite excited, and my excitement was justified. There I had everything which Firebug gives me and more. Much, much more.

Click to view full-sized screenshot:

All I can say is: Microsoft… innovative? WOW.

This menu is jam-packed full of features, but here it is in a nutshell. In the ‘home page’ you can get the page’s source WITH 100% CORRECT SYTAXING ! (although it MASSIVELY FAILED on bthaxor.com – only picked up one-fifth of my html and didn’t close the tags. HAH.), the CSS and a menu called ‘Script’ which gives the full page source and full-featured debugging tools. I’m very impressed.

It doesn’t end there: the other menus include validation tools, and dozens of options to reload the webpage using different modes including not showing images, not displaying Javascript and displaying the webpage without cached items. There’s NoScript for you! The page also has a ‘Search HTML’ box cleverly placed in one corner. Ohyeah, and this is also where you can change the page rendering mode of IE8 (default is standards mode!), and you can toggle compatibility view from here. I truly am blown away.

Upon closer inspection the menus of IE8 actually make sense this time, and it was while browsing here that I stumbled upon the new ‘Internet Options’ menu – it’s basically the same with a few more options here and there.

In terms of webpage-rendering speed, I honestly didn’t see any improvement from IE7. Firefox is the clear winner here. All the pages I browsed to were fine, which is a relief because with the beta version there were many complaints of pages not rendering correctly – the most infamous example being Google Maps and IE8 Beta 1.

New features:

I’ve actually already gone through all the new features I deem worthy of talk, but here are a few more you may find interesting. There’s the new ‘Web Slices’ addition – basically, this is like RSS on steroids. The idea is very interesting, however I believe the execution wasn’t as spectacular. The idea is you can add different slices which can be accessed under the one menu, and the menu provides little snippets of the sites you add. For example if I add the Hotmail slice, I’ll get the most recent 5 messages in my inbox without even opening the page. This is an excellent idea especially for social networking, because it leads to being able to view someone’s most recent Tweets, or to quickly see your friends’ Facebook statuses. Unfortunately, this great idea was cut short by its poor implementation: it took me 15mins alone to find the Web Slices icon and how to add slices, and most of the websites I viewed had very poor integration. If this feature is improved, though, it can go a long way.

Finally, the last feature worth mentioning is ‘Accelerators’. These let you highlight text on a page and do useful things with it, such as map addresses, translating the text instantaneously and sharing items via social networks. I disabled this feature though, since the chances I’ll ever switch from Firefox are very slim, and it seems to slow down loading of pages after a few tests with and without this feature.

Final verdict:

The final verdict for IE8 is a big thumbs-up from me. I hope you’ll hear me say that about Windows 7 soon – and I hope this is enough to put Microsoft back on track. One big word of advice for Microsoft though: I’d do a great big second pass on Web Slices, which is an amazing idea – IF IMPLEMENTED CORRECTLY.

I’m definitely not switching from Firefox and I still urge you all to use Firefox. I must say, however, that I’m very impressed by IE8, and if you really want to use Internet Explorer, I heavily recommend the update. I hope Mozilla will take a hint from the Developer’s Tools menu and we see that in Firefox 3.5