Product Reviews

The idea is to skip as many unnecessary steps as possible when jumping from site to site. Say you're browsing this site for laptop reviews. You can just select the name of the product and a small blue arrow will appear: click it and you'll be offered options such as "Search with Google" or, if you have other search engines stored, you can search with those instead.

However, it's a blow that as standard the Accelerators are so Microsoft-skewed. Of the six default options, five are Microsoft services: define with Encarta, blog with Windows Live Spaces, Email with Live Mail, Map with Live Maps, and Monopolise with Windows Services. (Okay, the last one is biting satire. In reality, it's Translate with Windows Live.)

That said, it does show its power here if you want to quickly look up an entry on Encarta, for example. You don't even have to leave the page: it will show you the overview (if it's entered in Encarta's rather paltry database) and that's often enough to satisfy your question.

We can see a use for Accelerators, but the other two big new features - which have both been enhanced since beta 1 - are less overwhelming.

Web slices can be thought of as RSS on steroids, with the idea being that websites such as pcpro.co.uk will enable the most popular sections of the site as Web slices. That means people can drag them to the Favorites bar (which sits above the row of open tabs) and IE8 will regularly poll the site for updates.

Then, instead of heading to the site to see what new articles have been published, you can see a preview of them, complete with pictures, by moving the cursor over the Web slice in your Favorites bar.

Microsoft uses lots of examples when you might want to do this - auction updates, sports scores, weather details, stock quotes - but the need for the website creators to adapt their sites means it's likely to be some time before it gains any popularity. If, dare we say, ever.

Visual search is another Big New Thing. This works on the basis that people often respond more clearly to images than they do words, so Microsoft is working with the likes of Ebay and Amazon to provide pictures in the drop-down search preview pane when people search using their engines. Just to highlight the potential hurdles, it doesn't work with Amazon UK yet, just Amazon US.

Really new features

One brand new feature in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, as opposed to beta 1, is InPrivate browsing. This allows you to browse sites safe in the knowledge that any images you see won't be

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cached, that it won't be saved in your History and it won't keep any cookies.

It has a number of obvious uses ("porn mode" is the web's unofficial term) but Microsoft executives are at pains to point out the occasions when you might want to be discreet when browsing. For example, checking a medical condition, looking for a present, checking your email on someone else's PC.

It's easy enough to activate: simply press the Safety drop-down tab and InPrivate Browsing is one of the options. A small logo appears in the taskbar to show you're in InPrivate mode. While on the subject of the Safety tab, this also makes it easy to quickly delete your browsing history.

Admittedly, InPrivate browsing won't be a revelation for users of Safari, who've been using a similar feature since the last release, or fans of Google Chrome and its Incognito mode.

A more interesting feature still is InPrivate Blocking. This tracks the third-party feeds being displayed on sites - for example, the Top 5 books being listed to the right of this review are taken from the separate site http://books.pcpro.co.uk

Not all feeds are so benevolent as this, though, and IE8 will track them to see how often they appear. When their frequency in the sites you visit reaches some 'predetermined' point, IE8 will start blocking them.

That's a little controversial (do you really want Microsoft to censure your web browsing?) but what isn't is the extra visibility you get with IE8 over these feeds. At any point, you can see what third party feeds are being used by the sites you visit and choose to block or unblock them.

The final security feature worthy of note here is the built-in cross-site scripting filter. This looks out for the characteristics of a cross-site scripting attack, and blocks it.

Stability and speed

Microsoft makes big claims about the IE8's speed, both its handling of JavaScript and its rapid start-up times. However, you only need to use Google Chrome and IE8 side by side to feel just how much more responsive Chrome is. IE8 is both slow to load and sluggish to use in comparison.

Theoretically, IE8 should be more resistant to crashes than its predecessors. Microsoft has sensibly focused development time on robustness, so that when a website crashes the browser, it's only the current window that's affected.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this nice technological development has been rather blown away by Google Chrome's approach - to dedicate a Windows process to each tab is much more sensible, as it means one CPU-intensive site won't tie up the whole browser.

We suspect Microsoft would opt for the same approach now the flag has been placed in the sand, but IE8 is far from the lean, streamlined browser that Chrome is, so less well-endowed systems would likely grind to a halt.

Try it. You just might like it

It's a little unfair to give Internet Explorer 8 a straight apples-to-apples comparison with Google Chrome. IE8 is a feature-laden program that we can't do proper justice even in this thousand-word review (we haven't covered its much-improved standards compatibility, the features it offers programmers and IT admins, and much, much more), while Chrome is a stripped-down what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of program.

But Chrome does throw IE8's big problem into sharp relief: its speed. From this point until the final release, Microsoft needs to put all its efforts into making IE8 more responsive - and quicker at handling JavaScript in particular.

Even as it stands, though, we'd recommend downloading IE8 beta 2 over Internet Explorer 7. It's more secure, it's a little faster, and at least a couple of its new features are genuinely useful.