Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview And Review

Right on the heels of FIrefox 3 release, Microsoft is finally cranking things up with the second beta release of Internet Explorer 8. While on the surface, IE 8 will look similar to IE 7, underneath you will find significant changes with usability improvements, security enhancements, and a platform for new add-ons.

One usability feature that I really like is with tab browsing and the capability to automatically group tabs by their source. If you open a search page and then right-click and select to open new pages from the search results list, all open tabs (from the same source) will have the same color code on the tab. This will make it much easier to keep track of specific pages when many tabs are open.

Another improvement with tabs is with crash prevention, where one buggy tab can cause all other tabs to be shutdown. IE 8 now implements a feature called tab isolation that prevents this from occurring since all tabs run in separate processes and eliminates one tab from effecting all other open tabs.

Other improvements include smarter search features such as being able to select different search engines on the fly and perform search related tasks directly from a web page, privacy and security enhancements, along with better compability functionality.

For an in-depth overview of these features in Internet Explorer 8, check out ZDNet article "Internet Explorer 8 gets a massive makeover". Also don't forget to check out IE 8 screen shot gallery that accompany the article.

If you want to play around with the second beta release if IE 8, you can download it from Microsoft site at the following location - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/