Few things to complain about IE8 beta 2, but …

I installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 today and was curious to experience all it’s new features.

IE 8 Beta

There are lots of post in the IE blog about various features & facts of IE 8 beta 2 & IE 8 in general. So I thought I just highlight what I feel those here…

I like the enhanced auto complete feature in IE, which I feel is similar to the ‘awesome bar‘ in FireFox 3. (I bumped on this blog post which calls FF address bar as ‘junk’, see if you ever felt like that). I have no idea why the ‘Activities‘ in beta 1 became, ‘Accelerators‘ in beta 2. I guess it’s something to do with marketing and I’m not sure if it has to do anything with Ubiquity of FireFox. In principle, these two are looking different: Ubiquity promises to increase user experience with [existing] mashups, where Accelerators are like plug-ins to IE (here‘s how you can create one). But how these are extended in the future will really determine their fate, in their current form

(At time of this writing, one of  IE 8 features link still talks about ‘Activities’ only. Here’s the updated page in another location (not sure why two pages!). Hope the names are not changed again, which will definitely bound to create confusion among users. )

I still need to check the In Private browsing on how it is going to change the way I’m going to peep into the Internet. ‘Search Suggestions‘ – simply great improvement. WebSlices are good but they need to be popularized (read ‘be used by all major websites’) first to have very good use across every user of the web. Smart Screen filter is an improvement over the beta 1’s website blocker, but kinda reminds me of FF3.

Overall, it’s thumbs up for IE 8 beta 2. Only using it for a prolonged period will tell me whether it had gotten any better for me ;). I still have one thing to complain about IE 8 beta about, at least only in my office PC. (strange that things work fine in my laptop. Anyhow, I need to know how to the fix the issue.)

There are other blogs that talk about FireFox & Internet Explorer fight over these features, but I leave it to you to decide which is better. My opinion is that both browsers are getting better everyday.

If you have tried IE 8 beta 2, comment here… Share what you felt good & bad!

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