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Internet Explorer 8 Video

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Internet Explorer 8
Created: 03/19/2009
Video description: Internet Explorer 8 takes some long-needed strides to bring it up to speed with its competitors. It's more secure, offers tab sandboxing, and introduces some slick new features--but is far from perfect. Check out what's hot and what's not in this First Look video.

Internet Explorer 8 Video Transcript

[ background music ]

>> Love Internet Explorer or hate it. It's impossible to deny that Microsoft has banged out a browser that they think will satiate the Microsoft faithful, and draw back users who left IE 7 for faster pastures. Hi, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET Download.com, and in this First Look video I'll be showing you some of the new features in Internet Explorer 8. Nobody disagreed that IE 7 was much safer than IE 6, but many argued that it didn't go far enough. In IE 8 there's stronger protections against phishing and malware attacks, and there's domain highlighting. It's simple, but clearly shows you what website you're visiting. Arguably the biggest news in IE 8 is that it better supports web development standards. A long-standing criticism of Internet Explorer, this should go a long way towards making the web render the same on any browser. It's not a particularly sexy improvement, but it's a necessary one. There's a compatibility mode for older web pages that were optimized for previous versions of Internet Explorer. IE 8 also features tab recovery, which allows a tab to crash without crashing Internet Explorer itself. IE 8 also adds a private browsing option, in private, so that you can turn off the cache and history recording features. Useful for keeping your private data private when browsing on a public computer, among other things. Web slices is a new feature that lets you save predefined sections of a web page for at a glance viewing. Instead of going to a traffic website for updates, the latest commuting news comes to you. The difference between web slices and accelerators, another new IE 8 feature, is that accelerators make repetitive tasks such as finding directions, simple one click behaviors. Users who've been playing around with Firefox 3 and Google Chrome will notice that IE 8's location bar does allow for searches directly from it, but it won't jump you to the most likely page you're looking for. You still need to navigate down the list to avoid jumping to a search page. A bigger concern for new IE 8 users is that when you install it, if you choose to include the optional Microsoft malicious software removal tool, it will run the tool. This can add ten to fifteen minutes to your install time, so be warned. [ background music ] Even with these drawbacks, IE 8 is a marked improvement on IE 7 in multiple ways. And if you're an Internet Explorer fan, you should definitely upgrade. With a First Look at Internet Explorer 8, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for Download.com. [ music ]

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