Internet Explorer 8 Features and Review
With the upcoming launch of Microsoft’s newest upgrade to Internet Explorer, users will now have more features, terms and add ons at their fingertips.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE 
will now have the ability to compete with Mozilla, Google and Apple browsers.
There are now accelerators, web slices and visual searches for the IE 8 user to use. You can now highlight a word to get a pop up of the definition. Web slices will automatically check your favorite web pages for updates, weather and top stories. A visual search will now give you suggestions from different services. Simply type in a topic or product you are searching for and an image of different topics or products on sale will pop up.
A BizForm Bar offers the user the ability to store passwords and account details, auto fill for registration form and a virtual keyboard.
The user will now be able to get the definition to acronyms simply by highlighting and right clicking on the word, and checking “define acronym”.
Fans of Digg will now be able to access the top ten stories at any given time right from the toolbar.
Facebook users will enjoy the added ability to be able to search for names on facebook on any given web page and be able to save web content to your Facebook profile with just one click from Internet Explorer 8. These two features are “find on facebook” and “share on facebook”.
Improvements to JavaScript’s speed, load times, and memory have been documented. With that being said, a few issues regarding compatibility with some popular sites continue, as documented on Microsoft’s Official IE 8 Blog. The notes listed Turbo Tax, HP Smart Web Printing, Google, Roxio, Realplayer 11 and some version of Skype, as well as Facebook are known to still have issues with compatibility.
Microsoft’s IE 8 version still struggles with restarts during installation and the time it takes to install. Between the actual installation and several restarts, the process takes approximately five minutes.
Microsoft IE 8 is still running behind Firefox and Safari in terms of speed. Additionally, RAM usage with IE 8 is still more than compared to Mozilla, Google and Apple, thus making it less favorable to users with older computers. Mozilla is gaining the momentum in this area as users are able to access the new features without having to invest in newer computers.
It will remain to be seen how Microsoft fares with the IE 8 public release during the economic crisis. Market shares have not seen an increase in share numbers as was expected. Therefore, most people will be watching to see if Microsoft can improve even more and bring a positive turnaround to their product.