Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 review

With Internet Explorer stuck in an ominous decline, Microsoft needed to pull something out of the hat with IE8. The company’s answer? A new focus on “Real-world performance” – a mixture of browser speed enhancements and features that Microsoft claims will accelerate everyday surfing. But will that stem the tide of defections to rivals such as Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Safari and Chrome?

Find out how to use the best of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 here

Microsoft claims IE8 is faster than its rivals on the 25 most-popular sites in the world – but it had to run a video in super slow-mo to show that IE8 rendered the Google homepage a few hundredths of a second faster than Firefox and Chrome.

Even Microsoft spokesmen concede “the naked eye can’t see the difference” and our hands-on tests prove likewise.

But Internet Explorer’s Achilles Heel has never been the speed at which its renders sites such as Amazon or Ebay: it’s AJAX-heavy sites such as Google Docs and Zoho.com where it has struggled.

IE7 was 23 times slower than Google Chrome the last time we compared the browsers’ performance with the SunSpider Javascript benchmark. IE8 shows emphatic improvement, but it’s still a long way behind the pack.

IE8 recorded a SunSpider time of 5.53 seconds – five times slower than the Safari 4 beta and Chrome, and more than three times slower than Firefox 3.1 beta 3.

How does that translate to “real-world” performance? It took both Chrome and Firefox 3.1 only 19 seconds to open and start a 16-slide presentation in Google Docs, for instance, while Internet Explorer 8 took almost twice as long at 33 seconds. It’s a sea change from IE7, but simply not enough to claim raw-performance parity, and that’s a problem that’s only going to be accentuated when Microsoft launches its own online apps with Office 14 next year.

Clips and accelerators

So what of the new features that Microsoft claims will make our day-to-day surfing more efficient? The most notable of these is Web Slices, a feature that allows you to clip parts of websites and add them to small, expandable windows in the toolbar, to keep track of things such as webmail accounts, Ebay auction items or Facebook status updates.

The Web Slice tab flashes orange when the content is updated, and you can alter the frequency of updates – although the maximum frequency of every 15 minutes might be a little slow for email accounts.

The Web Slices were, however, still very buggy during our tests. The Ebay Web Slice refused to install, while those that did work had scroll bars that dipped in and out of view, leaving us unable to skim through their content without awkwardly resizing the window. It’s a potentially useful feature, but it relies on third-party websites to make their sites Web Clip compatible and it’s horribly flawed at launch, although Microsoft insists it will improve.

Web Accelerators, on the other hand, are a definite productivity booster. Highlight a piece of text on a web page and up pops a little box that offers a variety of next steps, such as translating the text, looking it up on Wikipedia or copying text or links straight into an email.

This works particularly well for getting maps of addresses: simply highlight the postcode, choose Map with Live Search and a little thumbnail map of the destination appears, with the option to click through to a full map page. And, to Microsoft’s credit, it’s easy to swap out the company’s own services for with third-party alternatives, such as Gmail and Yahoo Maps.
The search box in the top right-hand corner has also been smartened up, with the option to add a variety of different search providers, or search engines from your favourite sites. Choose Ebay, for example, and thumbnail pictures appear alongside auction listings that match your search terms; or type “weather London” and Windows Live delivers a mini-forecast direct from the search box. It’s quick and clever but, once again, only worked intermittently.

Cluttered chrome

While Google is spearheading the minimalist look with the Spartan Chrome interface, Microsoft is rushing headlong in the opposite direction. Though the interface is largely unchanged from IE7, the addition of Web Clips to the Favourites Bar can leave the top of the browser window looking desperately cluttered, especially if you have several tabs open simultaneously. You can switch Toolbars on and off, but that rather defeats the object of the new features.

One innovative interface tweak is the grouping of tabs: if you choose to open a link in a new tab, both the parent tab and its offspring are highlighted in the same colour. Not only does this make it easy to see which tabs are related to another, but the whole coloured group can be shut down simultaneously. A nice touch for people who want to shut down several unused tabs in one swoop.

For those who don’t want any trace of their internet history preserved, IE8 introduces the now obligatory privacy mode, dubbed InPrivate Browsing. An InPrivate logo appears in the address bar to reassure you that any site you visit won’t be logged in your history or drop cookies on your system.

Behind the scenes

There’s been a fair bit of work going on behind the scenes in Internet Explorer 8, too. The seismic shift is Microsoft’s improved adherence to web standards, meaning that site owners will no longer have to bodge their sites to work with Microsoft’s browser.

It’s a welcome and long overdue move, but it could mean that sites optimised to work for older version of IE now appear “broken” in IE8. Microsoft offers two ways around this: a simple addition to the site’s header that tells the browser to render it in IE7 mode for site owners, and a Compatibility Mode in the browser that allows users to force the old rendering engine on sites that haven’t been updated.

It’s a clumsy, but necessary evil, and means that Internet Explorer 8 can maintain support for older sites while upgrading its HTML and CSS parsing to an extent that it now passes the Acid2 standards test.

Microsoft might have a sniffy disdain for Chrome’s clean design, but it’s borrowed one of the browser’s other innovations: dedicating a separate system process to each tab. Microsoft says this will make IE8 more robust, and an automatic crash recovery system, for example, retains text typed into webmail so that users don’t have to retype lengthy messages if a tab crashes. We’ve been unable to replicate that in our tests, but we haven’t experienced any problems with the browser’s stability in the brief time we’ve had to test the final code.

Security has also been beefed up: domains are highlighted in the address bar (another Chrome steal) to help prevent phishing attacks, a cross-site scripting filter aims to prevent malware running – even from seemingly legitimate sources – and the SmartScreen Filter prevents users from entering data into potential phishing sites.

Good, but no cigar
All told, IE8 is a vast improvement on its predecessor – but then that really is damning with faint praise. New features such as Accelerators and Web Clips show promise, but Microsoft will certainly need to vastly improve the latter if they’re not to become another also-ran.

Yet, there’s little here to tempt back the Firefox converts. Raw performance remains an issue and there’s nothing that screams “must-have”. IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game, but still a long way short of the lead.

Internet Explorer 8 will be available for download here from 4pm on 19 March.

Details
Software subcategory	Web browser
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	yes
Operating system Windows XP supported?	yes
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	no