Internet Explorer 8 versus Chrome
By Mary Branscombe
Published: September 24 2008 15:34 | Last updated: September 24 2008 15:34
<SCRIPT language=javascript type=text/javascript>function floatContent(){var paraNum = "3"paraNum = paraNum - 1;var tb = document.getElementById('floating-con');var nl = document.getElementById('floating-target');if(tb.getElementsByTagName("div").length> 0){if (nl.getElementsByTagName("p").length>= paraNum){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName("p")[paraNum]);}else {if (nl.getElementsByTagName("p").length == 3){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName("p")[2]);}else {nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName("p")[0]);}}}}</SCRIPT>You find the web page you want. You scroll down, find what you need to know, close the page and get back to work. Then two minutes later, you think of something else you need to check, so you have to either trawl through your browser history or run the search all over again.
Frustrations such as these are one of the areas Microsoft hopes to address with its new version of Internet Explorer, which lets users right-click any tab to re-open the last browser tab they closed or choose recent pages on any new tab.
“One of the three themes of Internet Explorer 8 is everyday browsing,” says Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for Internet Explorer. “How people really use the web. Simple things that improve discoverability, what I call being in flow.”
Some of this is very basic, such as renaming the under-used “Links” bar as “Favourites” and making it faster to add bookmarks, explains Mr Hachamovitch. “There’s a button you click to add it to the Favourites bar; there’s no complexity, no ‘do you want fries with that?’.”
Open one page from a link on another tab and both tabs will take the same colour. More useful is the “smart address bar” which suggests pages you have previously visited and bookmarked as you type, as well as common searches and illustrated results from sites such as Google and Wikipedia. You can also see suggestions for related sites based on the pages you tend to visit.
Accelerators make it easier to use information on a web page by adding it to a blog post or getting a map for an address, using services from Microsoft, Google and others that work on any site. Web slices allow you to subscribe to a “slice” of information on a page, such as a particular eBay auction, but these rely on the website building in support.
Under the covers are more substantial changes as Microsoft implements the latest versions of web standards, including CSS 2.1 and some features of HTML 5; it also fixes many layout bugs of previous versions. This is controversial because while some pages will look better others will have new problems, so there is a button to switch to a “compatibility” mode.
Other features allow mash-ups and Web 2.0 tools to be developed more securely, with protection against “cross-site attacks” which Mr Hachamovitch calls “real protection for something that is important, not some obscure attack”.
If you wish to browse without leaving a trail, the InPrivate feature does not store the history, temporary internet files or cookies; there is also an option to block ad services that track users across multiple websites to offer more targeted adverts, although Chris Wilson, the Internet Explorer platform architect, agrees that this may cause some tension with Microsoft’s own advertising arm.
Mr Hachamovitch claims the new browser will be faster and more reliable, with problems on one page not affecting other browser windows: “We have done deep technical work to separate browser tabs from each other,” he maintains. Pages that crash are automatically reloaded; any form-filling you had done should be restored; and if the whole browser crashes – or you close it without thinking – you can re-open all your previous pages at once.
Hardly had Microsoft put out the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 than Google announced its own browser, Chrome, which has a similar privacy feature, a novel way of presenting recently opened pages as thumbnails and its own implementation of recent and upcoming standards.
Chrome has certainly taken some of the attention away from IE8. But enterprises who have committed to IE8 for internal applications are unlikely to switch any time soon, making this a battle for end users.
So far Chrome is taking users from both Internet Explorer and Opera, with little impact on Firefox’s market share. Mr Wilson, who is also the chair of the HTML 5 standards committee, predicts that multiple browsers will always take different approaches. “You differentiate on the user experience and on the standards you implement,” says Mr Wilson, “and nobody implements all the standards.”
