It’s been 18 months since Internet Explorer 7 brought us tabbed browsing, anti-phishing technology and more. So what can we expect from the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8?
We took it for a test drive. By James Stables
The first beta version of an application is usually long on bugs, short on features and bears little resemblance to the eventual finished program. And so I expected most of my time with Internet Explorer 8 to be working around unexpected crashes and strange behaviour. But no: despite the warnings that the beta was just for developers, I found it ran smoothly and gave me no real problems.
For starters, the download is relatively small, at 14MB. It installed quickly and with no complications, then opened to display an interface that looked similar to Internet Explorer 7. The program ran well, occasionally a little on the slow side (entirely normal with betas), but with no crashes. Microsoft has been working on browser reliability. In particular, they’re introducing a feature called Tab Isolation, which means a crash in one tab is much less likely to bring down the whole browser. Better still, the new Automatic Crash Recovery feature will try to recover and restore a crashed tab, and if there’s a critical error – someone turns the power off, say – it’ll restore all the tabs you had open. We tried closing IE8 processes from Task Manager and this worked faultlessly.
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