Ten tweaks to love (and hate) in IE8

• Tags:
• Session,
• Browsing,
• Filter,
• Activex

Debra Littlejohn Shinder

Published: 26 Sep 2008 15:53 BST

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…the matches in yellow, as shown in Figure F.

The address bar is smarter now, too. You can type a search term there instead of in the Search box, and you'll see suggestions of sites that pertain to the text you typed, based on your browsing history, as shown in Figure G.

8. Security, security, security
Security is on all our minds these days, and IE8 adds a number of security enhancements. The good news is that it has done so without making security 'in your face' — a common complaint about Windows Vista's enhanced security.

New security features include:

• DEP/NX memory protection to help prevent non-executable code from running in memory
• Changes to ActiveX that will isolate the controls installed by a particular user (Per-User ActiveX), so that, if one user should install a malicious control, other user accounts won't be affected
• XSS filter that makes it more difficult for attackers to exploit cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
• SmartScreen filter (formerly the phishing filter) that's faster and more user-friendly and has been given group-policy support and new heuristics

For more information about IE8 security enhancements, see the series of posts to the IEBlog on the MSDN site.

9. Where did those toolbars go?
Some new IE8 users have complained that their Links bar disappeared after installation. Actually, it gets a new name: now it's part of the Suggested Sites bar. It retains the links you had on your Links bar in IE7.

If you open a second instance of IE8, you may not see the links by default. You can grab the edge of the Suggested Sites bar and move it up or down to a new line, and it will expand so you can see your links again. This is a slight annoyance, although it's far outweighed by the improvements in IE8.

Another thing that I've heard several users complain about is the fact that, when they installed IE8, it disabled their Google Toolbar. In fact, a few told me that they rolled back to IE7 solely because of that.

I haven't used the Google Toolbar much with IE7 because it added the built-in search bar, where you can select Google as your search provider if you want. However, some users miss other features of the Google Toolbar, such as the ability to save Toolbar settings online and access them from any computer.

In the earlier beta of IE8, the Google Toolbar caused frequent crashes. This is probably the reason that Microsoft disabled it by default in Beta 2. It does not remove it, however, and you can re-enable it by clicking Toolbars in the View menu and checking Google Toolbar.

When I've done so as an experiment, it has functioned without problems, but be aware that it may cause instability.

10. Standards break some sites
For many years, Microsoft has been criticised for not adhering to web standards established by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which creates specifications and standards for the web) in previous versions of IE. Opera even filed a lawsuit asking the European Commission to force Microsoft to follow the standards.

By default, IE8 complies with all established standards. Ironically, this causes some websites (those that were designed for IE6 and IE7) to display improperly in IE8. For instance, some content may not show up or things may be misaligned.

However, Microsoft anticipated this and included a Compatibility button. Its icon, appropriately enough, is a representation of a broken page, and it appears at the right end of the address bar along with the Refresh and Stop icons, as shown in Figure H.

If a page doesn't render correctly, you can click this button, and IE8 will go into compatibility mode and behave like IE6 or IE7, so the page will appear correctly.

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