Internet Explorer 8 Goes a Different Way

Microsoft displays new and welcome restraint in its latest browser beta.

I'm not bowled over by Microsoft's new beta of Internet Explorer 8. First of all, it looks almost exactly the same as Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7), which was arguably one of the most significant updates in the browser's roughly 12-year history. The tabs, address bar, Favorites and Home buttons, and RSS and other links are all in the same places as they were in IE7 and appear little changed. Microsoft says that many of the forward-facing consumer features aren't active in this beta. Maybe they'll make a bigger impression. For now, however, I contend that it would be more accurate to call this release IE 7.5.

That said, all in all, I'm pleased.

Last year, Microsoft overhauled the interfaces in its tent pole products—Office, IE, and Vista. This time around, the company seems content with taking a measured approach, one that's clearly more focused on what's inside the browser than on what's on the outside.

It took me a while to get used to the IE7 interface. I loved the tabs and knew how to work with them, thanks to Firefox. I hated that Home, Refresh, and Stop had been separated, and I had hoped that Microsoft would consider reuniting them. By now, though, I've grown accustomed to IE7's quirks. I've even embraced some, particularly the Favorites panel, which drops down over the left-hand side of your page and allows you to navigate easily through and find all of your stored links, even if they're nested deep inside multiple folders. The RSS button on the main toolbar is a handy feature, but I often wonder if consumers miss it because there's no label.

I decided to hop on the beta bandwagon early, because I was actually having some trouble with IE7. It's been my experience that software updates often automatically fix major problems without much user intervention.

For weeks I'd been running IE7 without add-ons. It's easy to do: You simply right-click on the IE desktop icon and select Start Without Add-ons. This loads IE as fresh and new as the day you first installed it. This action was necessary because IE had been crashing a lot—often when I was scrolling up or down on a Web page, but not always. Sometimes, I just clicked in the wrong place and the browser would freeze. I noted that, at one point, a reader had a similar problem, and our software expert, Neil J. Rubenking, suggested that an add-on-free load might get around the problem.

An add-on-free IE7 worked like a charm for me, except when I wanted to do things like view Flash video. As a result, I began using Firefox as my primary browser. I like Firefox, but it has its own interface quirks, and with enough tabs running, it's as much of a resource hog as IE.—next: A Soft Spot in my Heart >