Webware

LOS ANGELES--Although Microsoft intends to talk a bit about its plans for the future of Internet Explorer this week, the company won't offer preview code of its next browser, CNET has learned.

The software maker is also not planning to announce a move to the WebKit engine, as some had speculated.

In his opening keynote at the Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie pledged that Microsoft will make Internet Explorer the absolute best Windows browser, but did not offer further details.

Microsoft is expected to talk more about its browser plans as part of Wednesday's keynote speech. During that talk, he is expected to talk about some--but not all--of its "focus areas" for the next browser version, a Microsoft representative told CNET.

The latest version of IE 8 was released in March and is also built into Windows 7. Despite the new release, though, Microsoft faces intense competition from Firefox as well as from Google and Apple.

In addition, Microsoft has struggled to get Internet Explorer users to move past IE 6.

In the interest of broadening my horizons, I promised Microsoft I'd give Internet Explorer 8 a fair shake by trying the browser as my default for a week.

And, boy, am I glad that week is over.

Microsoft's browser rules the roost with about two-thirds of the market, according to Net Applications, which collects a broad set of data on which browsers people use. There's nothing like being built into the dominant operating system for winning a popularity contest. Microsoft takes advantage of that position by building instrumentation into IE that illuminates what a typical Web user is doing.

There's typical, and then there's me. As somebody who spends dozens of hours a week in a Web browser, I'm sorry to say IE 8 is not for me. Although my Web-heavy lifestyle isn't average, I believe the challenges I face on the Web foreshadow what the rest of the world will experience as the Internet inexorably encompasses ever more of our work and personal lives. I prefer browsers that aim toward where the puck is heading, as the tired but useful cliche goes.

IE 8 (download link) catches up to where the puck is today. It's definitely a big improvement over its predecessors, with some commendable features including default support for Web standards. And I do hope people upgrade.

It's just that in my personal experience, IE 8 is not in the same league as my default browsers, Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox.

There are competitive points from these rivals that one might have thought would weigh in to my antipathy for IE 8. Google makes a big fuss about Chrome's high-performance JavaScript engine, which lets it run Web-based applications with greater sophistication and alacrity. Firefox fans adore the wealth of extensions that can tailor the browser to innumerable specific needs without cluttering the interface for those who don't want such features. Microsoft counters with a study that shows its page-loading speed generally beats out rivals.

Slooooooow
In reality, it was something more mundane that gave me a Pavlovian feeling of dread when I needed to use the browser: its interface is slow.

When it was time for basic interactions such as launching new tabs, switching tabs, closing tabs, commanding IE to open pages, and scrolling through pages, I found myself all too often waiting for the browser to respond to my mouse and keyboard. I did miss some Firefox extensions, even though I'm not a big user of them personally, and I did find Web applications like Gmail and Google Docs a bit slower. But those two gripes paled in comparison to performance.

Here's a sample diary entry from Tuesday, March 24: "31. Accidentally used Firefox for some browsing. What a relief!" I hadn't realized until that moment that I'd been inwardly cringing at IE 8 use.

The sluggishness problem got worse as my Lenovo dual-core laptop's 3GB memory was taxed by running the 10 or 12 programs I need to do my job. Most days, I shut down my Windows XP work machine once a day without thinking much about it. But during IE 8 week, I found myself craving a fresh start by mid-afternoon. IE 8 didn't bear the load as gracefully as rivals, especially as the tabs piled up.

Let me give some credit to Microsoft on the performance front, though. On my home machine, a Windows Vista 64-bit quad-core model with 6GB of memory, IE 8 was much more competitive with Chrome and Firefox, especially when compared with IE 7.

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Internet Explorer 8 has a cool feature where you get more than just one option in the search bar when you type in a keyword. But the default only gives you two options. Here's how to add more search options to the IE 8 search bar.

Go to Tools and select Manage Add-ons.

Then select Search providers.

You'll see Microsoft Live Search and whichever options you chose during install. If that was Live Search, that's all you'll see.

Now click Find more search providers.

You'll get a list of various options. Press "Add to Internet Explorer" to add the providers you want. Each time you'll get the option to make it a default search provider, and include terms in the suggested search terms. If you don't see your favorite. Scroll to the bottom and click "Create your own search provider."

Now open a new tab, and enter the URL of the search engine you want to include. Search for the word TEST in all capital letters. Copy the URL of the search results page by highlighting it and pressing the "Windows" and "C" keys at the same time.

Now click back to the tab that says "crate your own search provider." Use the "Windows" and "V" keys to paste the URL you copied earlier into the box marked URL. Then give the search engine a name. And press Install Search Provider. If you want to make this your default search provider, check that box. Then press Add one more time.

Now when you type a keyword in the search box, icons for all the search engines you selected will show up. Just click on one with your mouse to search the keywords you typed in that engine.

Like most Web browsers, Internet Explorer 8 has add-ons. But sometimes you may want to get rid of them, even if just temporarily. IE 8 has made it easier to disable and enable your add-ons. Here's how to do it.

Let's say you have the Google Toolbar running in IE 8. You should see an X to the left of the toolbar. It's the familiar X that usually means you can close something. In this case, you'd be right to guess that. Click that X and you'll disable the toolbar.

Now that can be dangerous if other add-ons rely on the one you're disabling. So IE 8 gives you a lovely list of any dependent add-ons and the option to disable them at the same time. Once you've made your selections, press the Disable button and the add-on will disappear.

What if you want it back?

Go to tools and select Manage Add-ons.

Select the type of add-on, in our example from above, it would be a toolbar.

Scroll down until you find your toolbar. And press enable.

IE 8 will suggest re-enabling any related add-ons you disabled earlier. Press enable again, then press close.

In the case of the toolbar, even though I had enabled it, it still didn't show up. I had to go to View, select toolbars and select the Google Toolbar to make it viewable.

If you want to browse through all the add-ons available for IE 8, visit www.ieaddons.com.

Internet Explorer 8 has a new feature that lets you get a lot done just by highlighting words on a Web page. Here's how to take advantage.

Highlight any text on a Web page by holding down the left mouse button and dragging your cursor over the words. You'll see a blue box with an arrow. Click on that and you'll get a list of options.

If, for instance, you're highlighting an address, you can choose to map it on Google Maps, pinpointing the location. It can also do regular Web searches.

Let's say you're reading a column and you want to know more about the author. Highlight the author's name and choose search. You'll get search results for that person. You can also translate a phrase, e-mail certain text, and even blog with Windows live.

These options are called Accelerators by Microsoft. If you want to customize your options, highlight text, click the blue box, then select all accelerators--that gives you a bunch more options, including the capability to manage accelerators. Select that option. From there, you can disable or remove accelerators. Or click Find more accelerators and you'll go to a page where you can add many more.

It's no secret that when judged by several popular Web browser speed tests, Internet Explorer 8 doesn't hold up well. Beta versions of IE 8 have been available to the general public for more than a year, and today's release of the stable build didn't include anything revolutionary.

Using the SunSpider JavaScript test, the official IE 8 scored 9849.4 ms on a Windows Vista machine with 2 GB of RAM and a 3.00 Ghz clock. This is significantly slower than most other major browsers. Not surprisingly, Microsoft claims (scroll down to Case Study Videos) that these kind of speed tests aren't relevant to how most people use their browser, and there may be some legitimacy to that.

Setting aside the issue of speed for a moment, some of the features in Internet Explorer bring it up to what we've come to expect from a browser, and some of them forge ahead. Many of these are borrowed from other browsers, and at least in the case of Firefox, the features can be imported using extensions. Indeed, some of Microsoft's bigger innovations like Web slices and Accelerators were replicated via Firefox extensions a while back.

If you're new to IE 8, Web Slices lets you save predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead of going to a traffic Web site for updates, the latest commuting news comes to you. Web slices are not an automatic feature, so you'll need to install them by clicking on the Get more add-ons option on the Favorites bar, going to the IE Add-ons site, or choosing Manage Add-ons under Tools on the menubar.

To install a Web slice, you must click the Add button from IE Add-ons site. That will open up the site in a new window, and as you mouse over it you'll see green boxes appear to indicate a potential Web slice. Click on the box, and the Web slice will be added to your collection, with an option to place it directly on the Favorites bar. Checking the weather or traffic or even headlines becomes as simple as click the drop-down arrow for that slice.

Similarly, Accelerators make repetitive tasks one-click behaviors, such as getting a definition for a word. Once you've installed the Accelerator, double-clicking on a word will bring up a blue box. Click the box to see a drop-down list of choices. Once you mouse over your selection, a pop-up window will show you the precise piece of information you've been looking for, whether it's a definition or a blogging window.

InPrivate browsing introduces a cache and history on-off switch, similar to features offered by Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Accessible from the Safety menu or using the CTRL+SHFT+P hot key, it opens a new browsing window with a label at the left of the location bar that indicates you're using InPrivate. There's also InPrivate Filtering, located just below InPrivate browsing, which can be customized to tighten or loosen the noose placed on information sent out when visiting certain sites.

There are also several slight but useful features in IE 8. As you open new tabs, they get color-coded and moved around so that similar sites are grouped together. I found this a bit jarring at first, because I expected new sites to be opened in the same place, but I can understand the logic behind it and why some users might like that kind of tab behavior. Tabs can be configured at the bottom of the General page under Internet Options.

Internet Explorer 8 also has tab sandboxing like the Webkit-based browsers from Google and Apple. You can't rip a tab off into a new window, but when a tab crashes, IE itself won't, and the tabs are configured to either resurrect themselves or open a new page on your default search engine.

There's a greater emphasis on Web standards and security than before. The SmartScreen and cross-site scripting filters throw up a red warning page when you're about to visit an unsafe site. There's also domain highlighting, which grays out the name of the URL you're looking at except for the domain itself. This sounds simple, but effectively draws attention to spoofed site URLs.

There's also a compatibility button so that sites designed specifically for IE 7 and earlier can still be viewed. Placed at the right-hand side of the location bar, clicking it should reload the site you're looking at under the IE 7 rendering engine.

IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There's no default "smart" location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.

Drawbacks aside, there's no reason to not upgrade if you're an old fan of IE, and there's even a few things in IE 8 for new users. Even though there are some nice usability features in IE 8, I think that Internet Explorer has a long way to go to replace the damage that the notoriously insecure IE 6 did to its reputation.

Internet Explorer 8 takes some long-needed strides to bring it up to speed with its competitors. It's more secure, with tab sandboxing and more aggressive malicious site warnings, and introduces some slick new features like Accelerators and Web slices.

Even with better support for Web standards, it's far from perfect. Check out what's hot and what's not in this First Look video.

Internet Explorer 8 is now ready to download. We installed the final build of Microsoft's latest browser, and captured the (looong) download process and our first impressions of some of the featured highlights in pictures.

If that's not enough (it never is,) CNET's Ina Fried has the full story of Microsoft's launch of IE 8 at Redmond's MIX 09 conference, and some details about a version of the browser for Windows 7. Also stay tuned to Download.com for our forthcoming video review and an in-depth look at the features and faults we find with Internet Explorer's latest iteration--and how IE compares with browsers Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera.

As Microsoft counts down the final days to when it feels that Internet Explorer 8 is ready for public use, you can take a look at what's coming in this slideshow of IE 8's first Release Candidate.

Click on the image to your left to launch the gallery.