Internet Explorer 8: First Look, Part 2

In our first video on Internet Explorer 8 we looked at tabs and the Smart Address bar. In this second part we will show some more of the advanced features, starting with search.

The search box is at the top right of the window, where you would expect to find it. What's different is that it gets recommendations for you. For example, as we type in the author and title of a book, there are several suggestions from Google.

Looking for a text has been improved with Find in Page. Press Ctrl and F at the same time and the Find box appears at the top of the screen. Internet Explorer will highlight every instance of the search term and show how many times it has appeared in the Search bar. Very helpful for long documents.

The InPrivate feature is useful if you want to avoid leaving a trail in the browsing history. Here we are going to buy a copy of the book as a present and don't want it given away in the history page.

Click on the new Safety menu and select InPrivate Browsing. A completely new window is opened and there is an InPrivate icon in the Address Bar. Now it is possible to go to the online shop and search for the book. Normally the title of the web page would be shown in the history menu along with the title of the book and the website. With the InPrivate window closed, there is no record of this website in the history menu.

The Accelerators toolbar is useful for using text information found in web pages. In this demonstration we have a restaurant review along with the postcode. The postcode could be copied and pasted into Google Maps but you won't have to do this in Internet Explorer 8.

Instead, select the the text and release the mouse button. A small blue arrow appears beneath the selection. Click on this arrow to show the Accelerators menu with options for that text, such as posting to delicious.com or searching in Google. More usefully it can be sent to Google Maps.

This toolbar can be extended to include new options.

The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 will be out later on this year.