Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 today with much talked Inprivate browsing mode and some other useful features. You can download the latest version of IE8 from here.
You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.
While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.
We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
With the number of useful features like in private browsing, security, Internet Explorer is ready to give a tough fight for Firefox 3. Best of all IE8 is now much faster than the previous version.
After using it for few mins you will notice a feature called Smart Address Bar, which is similar to AwesomeBar in Firefox 3. It shows suggestions based on your web browsing histroy, favorites, and gives autocomplete suggestions.
Tabs got some makeover, and there is a kind of color coding for related tabs, this is not there in Firefox or any other browser. Suppose you are on this blog and opened a link in another tab, both the tabs will look in the same color, this is quite useful if you have large number of tabs open and want to see quickly the related tabs. You accidentally closed a tab and wondering how to open it, IE8 has introduced a reopen closed tabs feature with which you can open recently closed tabs.
Accelerators (formerly known as Activities) allow users to perform some tasks with a simple righ click context menu item. Select text on any page and select an accelerator, for example select text and click on translation, it will immediately translate that text and the translation appears in a bubble.
Web Slices
Web Slices allow you to subscribe to portions of your favorite websites and, with a single click in the Favorites bar, view and interact with the latest updates you care about most.
Compatibility mode allows to view sites which breaks in IE8, yes IE8 is a standards complaint browser, but some sites which are designed to work with ancient internet explorer versions may break. This mode allows to view those sites in IE8. IE8 beta 1 has IE7 mode, this is replaced with a compatibility mode in beta 2. There is a button beside the address bar which allows you to switch to compatibility mode easily.
And there is in private browsing and in blocking features which i discussed yesterday. Overall IE8 looks good and much faster than the previous versions, if you haven’t tried IE8 try it now, this version works good, it didn’t crash so far unlike beta 1.
Sounds pretty good, some of the new features sound nice.
I’m very used to and comfortable with FireFox, but I’m still interested in giving IE 8 a try when a more final release comes. I just hope that they live up to the hopes about updating their rendering engine.