Windows 7: Up and Running

Chapter 6. Internet Explorer 8

Windows 7 ships with the new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). IE8 builds on the foundation of IE7 and this latest release contains many useful enhancements in the areas of usability, privacy, and security.

In this chapter, you will learn about some of the innovations in IE8 and how they affect the way you surf the Web.

Usability

The first major noticeable improvement in IE8 is usability. Microsoft has taken pains to improve the usability of IE8 by adding the following features:

• Smarter Address bar that lists all the relevant sites you have visited by searching through your History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds

• Enhanced functionality of tabbed browsing by color-coding related tabs

• Support for older websites by displaying them using IE7 through the Compatibility View

• A much more usable Find feature to make searching for phrases on the web page easy

• Ability to visually search for items from providers like Wikipedia.com and Amazon.com

• Web Slices to help users monitor constantly changing web content

• Accelerators, which integrate commonly used functions into the browser so that users can perform common actions with a single mouse-click

Smart Address Bar

The Address bar in IE8 is now much smarter than its predecessor. In addition to typing websites’ URLs, you can now type in keywords and it will search across your History, Favorites, and RSS Feeds and display all matching sites that you have visited previously (see Figure 6-1).

Figure 6-1. The smarter Address bar

This feature is ...