Microsoft Hopes To Win Back Browser Market Share With Internet Explorer 8

IE8 Beta

(PhysOrg.com) -- Microsoft has a lot at stake with the success of Internet Explore 8 since they lost 7 percent of their browser market to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome browsers. IE8 has been in release candidate since January of 2009 and will mostly likely be a target for criticism for similar features already existing in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome browsers.

Microsoft claims that offers some new features and hopes that they can win back some of the market share they lost. Here are seven new and enhanced browsing features that hopefully will win back some former Internet Explore users.

Smart

With the Smart Address Bar, IE8's address bar is transformed into a search field of sorts. By typing a word or phrase into the address bar, IE8 searches through your browsing history, favorites and feeds to find websites related to your word or phrase. The results are based on page titles and keywords within the web address.

Tab Groups

We all know that Firefox was the first browser to come out with Tab Browsing. Microsoft hopes that they can improve Tab Browsing by organizing the tabbed browsing concept with tab Groups.

This is accomplished by organizing tabs, that were opened from the same site, next to one another and using the same tab color. These tabs can then be closed or moved as one single unit.

Web Slices

Web Slices will keep you up-to-date on information that changes often such as , stock quotes, sports, etc. Unfortunately not all sites will be compatible with the Web Slice functionality.

Whenever there are new updates the Web Slice section, which appears on your , is highlighted. By clicking on it you see a preview of the latest information and by clicking through to the link you are taken to the site where you can read all the details.

Enhanced

The enhanced search box on IE8 allows users to select what search engine they want and toggle between their choices. Each search engine will then display its search results in whatever format it chooses. For example, Live Search and Google search results is a drop-down list of text links, whereas eBay and Amazon searches are listed as thumbnails with descriptions.

Compatibility View Button

Sites that are not IE8 compatible will have their text and images misplaced on the page. By selecting the Compatibility View Button, the IE8 browser would use the IE7 rendering engine. IE8 also lets users maintain a list of non-compatible IE8 sites so that they don't have to click the Compatibility View Button every time they visit these sites.

Accelerators

An Accelerator icon, in the form of a blue arrow, appears whenever a word or phrase on a page is highlighted. By clicking on the icon, a list of related services appears related to the word or phase typed in.

Users can manage and add many accelerators for various web services. For instance, Windows Live, Google and Yahoo services, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. The list goes on and covers most popular Web services.

In-Private Browsing

When you are In-Private browsing, IE8 does not store data about your browsing session. This is accomplished by disabling your Temporary Internet Files, Web Address History, Cookies and Passwords. An In-Private" icon appears to the left of the url in the address bar whenever you are In-Private browsing and can be deactivated by simply closing the window.

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Citation: Microsoft Hopes To Win Back Browser Market Share With Internet Explorer 8 (2009, March 16) retrieved 28 March 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2009-03-microsoft-browser-internet-explorer.html
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