Internet Explorer 8: First Look, Part 1

Later this year Microsoft plans to release Internet Explorer 8, and here at Computeractive we have got our hands on an early version called Internet Explorer 8 RC1. It's not the finished product but it does contain most of what we expect to see in the final version. These two videos will give you a flavour of what to expect in Internet Explorer 8.

Here we have Internet Explorer 8 open at the Computeractive home page, and we will take a look at tabs first.

Most of us use tabs to organise our web browsing. If we open another story in a new tab, we can see that the tabs have been colour-coded yellow to show that they are from the same site. This is very useful when there are tabs open from lots of different sites, as you can see when we open up a couple of tabs from BBC News as these are colour-coded in purple.

The new tab button has also been greatly improved. When it is clicked, the new tab page appears with some helpful links. One is the Reopen closed tabs link.

One problem with having lots of tabs open is that if there is a problem in one tab, it can make the browser crash along with all the other tabs. Google has got round this with its Chrome browser and Internet Explorer 8 has a very similar feature. The page in this demonstration has been written deliberately to crash Internet Explorer. Although a message appears saying that Internet Explorer has stopped working, the other tabs survive and the tab is recovered.

The address bar is now called the Smart Address bar and, like the Firefox address bar, it has a search function built in. As you start typing it immediately offers the pages that match the text both in the address and the page title. If you type a search query rather than an address it will recognise this and make a Google search with those words. It can use any search engine that you want, not just Google.

Click to watch part 2 of Computeractive's video guide to Internet Explorer 8.