Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 launches- new standards of usability and safety

Internet Explorer 8 beta launched today and its new features promise to take the browser to new standards of user friendliness and safety. I was part of a live online demo (Live meeting + phone) organised by Microsoft’s Bangalore based evangelism team and the demo did not disspaoint me. Check out key features & changes below:

Visual Search suggestions: When you search from the default search box, it suggests different variants of the search keyword along with images (thumbnails); you also have quick links for searching the term directly on popular sites like wikipedia, youtube, yahoo etc. The interaction is well designed and is likely to catch on fast with users. Screenshot below…

Accelerators: Accelerators allow quick access to popular webservices that you use everyday. These can be accessed directly from a link or text within a webpage and can call up different services likes maps, email, language translation etc directly on the page without having to copy/paste the url or the text into the search or address bar. Check out below how the language translation accelerator display its results.

WebSlices: This feature is very impressive. Web slices are a way to bookmark frequently changing information/services in your browser (like updates to e-mail, weather reports, sports scores, stock quotes etc). Normally you would need to go to the destination site to access the service; with web slices the changing info can be checked directly in your browser. Adding the web slice is also easy… if a Web Slice is available on a page, a green icon will appears that can be added in a single click.

Then there are the usual sprinkling of security enhancements that have become a mandatory ritual of every IE release- inprivate browsing (browsing sesions where the browsing activity will not be recorded in the browser history, cookies etc), smart screen filter (popup windows that warn you about suspicious website links, malware installations attempts etc) on the page itself.

There’s good news for web application developers - its called Microsoft Developer Tools (screenshot above) and is the IE equivalent of Firebug. This should make the task of debugging in IE much easier.

Overall IE8 looks promising… features like web slices, accelerator etc are smart, nifty and look a winner. With the proliferation of widgets & mashups, the Web’s traditional page-based model is being seriously challenged. While browsing, users increasingly want features that involve mashing up different webservices and serving the content contextually on page rather than having to navigate down to the destination. If this model of of discovering/promoting content picks up, it can intrinsically change the way people consume the internet. Suggested sites or search terms can also take direct traffic away from search engines (think of this as a back handed attack on Google).

Incidentally on the day of IE8 launch, Mozilla released a Firefox add-in called Ubiquity, a command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. Ubiquity is capable of extracting items from Web pages and inserting them in whatever you’re creating, like an e-mail message or a blog post. Details here. Put Ubiquity alongside webslices & accelerators and you can discern a slow but sure trending towards fracturing of web pages.