Last time when a webpage crashes IE7, the whole browser will need to be restart and every tabs will be reloaded. This time in IE8, only that particular tab is restarted and reloaded. This is another way on how IE8 will enhance our browsing experience.
I had downloaded IE8 Beta 2 and installed on my home PC. Below is my experience on the installation.
If you had IE8 Beta 1
and you tried to install Beta 2 over it, you will get an error message
However removing IE8 is not via the normal ‘Add/ Remove Programs’ or ‘Programs and Features’ menu in Control Panel.
To uninstall Beta 1, go back to Programs & Features.
Look at the left hand panel, search for Installed Updates. You can see a screen as above when you click on it.
Right click on Windows Internet Explorer 8 and click Uninstall. Then you will get a prompt as shown above.
Confirm and wait for the uninstall to complete. You will be prompted to restart the PC.
Once restarted, double click on the installer file and wait for the intro screen
It will ask you whether to install updates or not. Up to you but I uncheck the box.
That’s it!! Simple installation process now started copying the files.
Again it ask you to restart the PC.
By using a stop watch to calculate (so this is not Olympic accuracy) the speed to page loading in IE8B2 compared with IE7 and Firefox 3.0, I got the following benchmark on popular web sites. Conclusion is I see IE8 will be on par with Firefox 3.0 in terms of performance.
Hotmail
| IE7 | 11 seconds |
| IE8 Beta 2 | 6 seconds |
| Firefox 3 | 7 seconds |
| IE7 | 10 seconds |
| IE8 Beta 2 | 9 seconds |
| Firefox 3 | 8 seconds |
Gmail
| IE7 | 13 seconds |
| IE8 Beta 2 | 8 seconds |
| Firefox 3 | 8 seconds |
Yahoo! Mail (New AJAX version)
| IE7 | 10 seconds |
| IE8 Beta 2 | 10 seconds |
| Firefox 3 | 10 seconds |
As reported by my pal Walter, IE8 Beta 1 indeed failed to rendered the all popular Hotmail web page properly. This prompted me to do some testing myself.
Yup, just as said, position all ‘koyak’, now let me try it in IE7 mode
Alright, now it is working. And seriously speaking, I feel the rendering in IE7 mode is faster than the original IE7 itself. Someone please help me bust this myth!
The installation experience of IE8 Beta 1 is about the same as IE7. The interface also, as I expected looks the same (pic below)
I installed IE8 on a Windows Server 2003 VPC image so I guess the menu bar shows up just as in IE7
Examined carefully, I notice the shortcut bar is back. It was one of my favorite feature on Internet Explorer prior to IE7. You can still have it in IE7 but the feel is just not there.
Observe carefully on the address bar, you will notice the domain URL is in bold while the rest of the URL is grayed out. is this for novelty or what I am not sure yet.
Right to the tabs area, there is a few buttons such as Home, RSS and Print button which is the same as IE7. Below is 2 of the extra buttons which I suspect its meant for developers only and they might go away in RTM.
Emulate IE7 - Accordingly IE8 has been defaulted to standards mode which as some cases web site optimized for IE7 might not look exactly the same, click on this Emulate IE7 and you will have IE8 behave just like IE7. For example in standard IE8 mode, the Silverlight website does not render properly.
After I click on the Emulate IE7 mode and restart IE according to instruction, it renders nicely.
Good thought, but too much hassle for end users, maybe make it more transparent in next beta release.
Developer Tool (Far right button with a arrow inside angle bracket) - This opens up a new window which shows you (with highlighting) the underlying HTML, CSS and JavaScript of the current webpage.
For Javascript, the developer tool also offers a debugger which is really great for web developers
For users two most obvious features are WebSlices and Activities, the details you might find it clearly and interestingly explained by Jane Kim, one of the program manager in IE team, there is a video interview on Mix website (click on pic)
For me my 2 lines explanations (with pic) without too much details. 
WebSlice
WebSlices is like a bookmark with preview. INstead of previewing the whole page, developer can determined only a certain portion to be display on IE8’s WebSlices button, see below for an example (pic 1 is the site, pic 2 is the WebSlice). This is how it works, I go to Stumble Upon website (one of the sample sites featured in IE8 home page)
If a portioned of the page is marked as WebSlice, I will see the purple WebSlice button when I hover my mouse across.
Clicking the purple button, that a window pops up, asking your permission to add it into your favorites.
It will then appear on my favorites toolbar, click on it will show me the update ’sliced’ portion of the page I added just now. There is a annoyance at the moment, the WebSlice preview always appear on top portion and not adjust accordingly to the space on the desktop, so I got to move my IE windows down a bit to see everything.
Activities (Smart Tag for IE)
Activities to me is really like charged up feature of Office’s smart tag. It a programmable feature where you can use it to call certain web service and pass in the highlight item on the web page as parameter.
For Example, below here I highlighted some text, then upon right click, there will be a range of built in activities list appear.
Should I want to find out more about the highlighted ‘developer’ word via Live Search, I just click on it.
Then a new windows pops up with search results on developer. What a good way to improve user experience by having less cut and paste!
Trust me, I think last night someone is working on a Google search activity.
The one last thing I want to see on IE is the download manager. For years I hope for a download manager like the one found in FireFox but IE8 beta 1 still have the same older download manager. Hope the team will improve it.
They include IE8 Beta1, Expression Suite 2 and Silverlight 2. I just downloaded them… see this weekend got time to try or not.
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By the way, dev.live.com got a facelift with new APIs announced.
Do check out Mix’s website.
The download link got to wait a few more hours… but the IE8 site is up here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm
Since this is a developer focused Beta release, you can find some information on the website regarding to new customisable features like Activity, WebSlices, Data URI and enhanced CSS capability. Gosh there is even some links to the hands on labs!
On top of that, Microsoft also provided a page to download tools to test out your website against IE8 Beta. There is even a beta version of the Developer Toolbar for IE8 here.
OK time to sleep, it’s 11.30pm Malaysian time here, ready to wake up tomorrow for a brand new browsing experience.
Twitter / patrickyong Delicious/patrickyong