Ten tweaks to love (and hate) in IE8

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• Browsing,
• Filter,
• Activex

Debra Littlejohn Shinder

Published: 26 Sep 2008 15:53 BST

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…retaining information you type into web forms, as well as preventing cookies from being stored on your system.

It's not a feature I expect to use much, but it would certainly be useful when using public computers or those shared with co-workers or family members under certain circumstances (for instance, when buying a surprise birthday gift for your spouse).

The feature is off by default. To turn it on, you just open a new tab and click the Start InPrivate Browsing link, which can also be seen in Figure A.

5. Tab grouping
Microsoft may be accused of copying some of IE8's new features, such as crash recovery, from Firefox. Google's Chrome browser, released in beta just a few days after the IE8 Beta 2 release, has a similar private-browsing feature — Incognito.

However, IE8 has one new feature — colour-coded tab grouping — that, as far as I can tell, is all its own, although I won't be surprised if others copy it in the future.

Colour-coded tab grouping lets you see at a glance which tabs have been opened from links within other tabs, because all the related tabs are the same colour. This is actually more useful than it sounds, and can be seen in Figure B.

When you right-click a tab, you have the options to close that tab, close the entire group or remove the tab from the group.

6. Accelerators and web slices
Accelerators (called 'activities' in the earlier betas) are little add-ins that make it quick and easy to apply a task to highlighted text.

For example, you can select a paragraph within a web page and translate it to another language without having to copy it and go to a translation site and paste it in. Or you can highlight a word and define it using a variety of sources, such as Encarta, Dictionary.com or Wikipedia. Or you can highlight an address or geographic location (city, state or country) on a web page and get a map directly on that page, without having to go to a mapping website.

The accelerators that you've installed appear in the context menu when you highlight text on a page and right click it, as shown in Figure C.

Figure D shows what happens when you highlight the word 'Afghanistan' and select the 'Map with Live Maps' accelerator.

A large number of accelerators are available. You can download them from the Internet Explorer Gallery.

Web slices are like RSS feeds, in that they let you subscribe to content so that you're updated when it changes. With the slices, however, you don't have to subscribe to an entire page; there can be different slices within a page.

Your selected slices are added to the Favourites bar and, when new information becomes available, the web slice will be highlighted. You simply click the slice in the Favourites bar to get a preview of the updated content; clicking on that will take you to the site itself.

7. Getting suggestive with search
IE8 attempts to make it easier to find what you're looking for by offering suggestions along the way.

When you type a search term, you can see suggestions that are based on your own browsing history and your chosen search provider. For instance, typing just a few letters brings up suggestions that may be relevant to your search, as shown in Figure E.

It's also easier to find specific information on a web page with IE8. When you select Find On This Page from the Edit menu or press Ctrl + F, a toolbar appears below the row of tabs. This is a welcome change from the Find dialogue box that would pop up in IE7 and obscure part of the web page.

The Find function searches as you type, and highlights…

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