Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk, today I wanted to show you Internet Explorer 8. I went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the Beta 2, and I will review it briefly against Firefox 3. So I went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the Beta 2 for my 64-bit operating system, if you have Windows XP – you can download it from there as well of course. And then run the set-up, so I am going briefly through the screens here and show you what happens when you install the Internet Explorer 8.
Just be aware that when you install it, it’s going to replace Internet Explorer 7. After you are done installing of course you can have to reboot your computer. And quickly do that right now, so let’s go through the screens here. And go to the license agreement and the terms and conditions and accept it of course. After you read all that and then next we will go through the screens and customize what we want. Now obviously you want to get the latest updates, we’ll leave that checked right? You don’t want to be behind so all you got – enable. And wait for it to download all of the options, once it’s done – it’s going to say you need to restart your computer of course. And we’ll just accept that and click on the restart now options.
So once you have restarted it, you get the Internet Explorer 8 icon in your desktop. You launch it and then it is going to start asking “You want to accept certain defaults or customize things.” And of course I don’t like to accept all the defaults – I am going to customize right? So I don’t use the express settings, I use the custom settings – now what I mean custom, I mean for example. IE 8 uses the live search by Microsoft as the search provider – I like using Google. So I won’t use the live search so I will say “Show me a web page after where I can select the Google for example.” That is my search, so I will do that, now IE 8 has these accelerator providers.
They are just shortcuts to online tools so that what that means and again I’m going to choose what I want. And not let it select, now smart screen filter – I would recommend that you will leave that term gone. Because that is going to produce some protection here against some naughty sites and content. So we’ll just enable that and of course do you want to make it your default browser? Well I am not quite sure yet so I am going to say no to that because I am Firefox 3 – I am happy with that yet. Maybe later I will switch it over to IE8 and I won’t import anything yet until I feel comfortable about it.
So then I will put con finish and by default it has OK, open up Internet Explorer 8 and it is asking me to choose to what search provider I want it to use. And I said I want to use Google so I click on that and then it asked me add that search provider. So then I will just click on add provider here and make that my default – and that is the search that appears on the top right corner of your browser right? So here is IE 8, so from a top view here – here’s the whole browser open quickly. So you can see there’s some bookmark links that they give you by default which I can remove.
If I switch over quickly to Firefox, there is not much difference here except for maybe right off that back you might notice that there’s more icons on the top left corner. And on the right side of Firefox – there are no menu items that accessing any preferences or additional features. The menu items on the top left corner of Firefox, in IE8 – you can enable the menu items to show also on the top left. But by default they don’t appear, by default you get these alternative menu items which are for different types of features which I am going to review in a moment. So just keep that in mind – that is similar to the Google Chrome. Google Chrome another browsers have these menu options on the right hand side instead.
So here is a close-up look of IE8 now it’s got the Smart search so that is no different from Firefox 3 for example and the Google Chrome so that is good. IE8 had advanced there; they got a decent browsing URL structure there. And if I go to YouTube.com like I just did for the first time here – it loaded really fast. It wasn’t cached in memory or nothing so it loaded really fast. So I was pleased to see that and of course it comes with some default links and I just delete those. The Tabs – you just click on that and then open up a new tab where you can press CNTRL+T. So the tab behavior, I am going to switch back from FireFox here.
The tab behavior of IE8 is very similar to the Firefox and other browser tabs here. Just press CNTRL+T – up comes the browser where you can right click on the tab and you get the menu item tab and you tab. And do stuff with the text, so IE8 has that too so it is the same thing and very familiar interphase. So that was good to see, so you can control that. One thing that IE8 has that – Firefox doesn’t have is this group tabs. So if I right click on a tab and add a new tab, it groups them. That means that tab came from that previous tab so they are both green so that way you can kind of group them together. So that was good, again the icons in IE8 there is only two here, forward and backwards but we got a quick tab.
So if I click on quick tab – it gives me these thumbnail views of what is currently open it all the tabs. Because sometimes you have like 10, 15, tabs open and we lose track what is going on. So you can just quickly view them all at once, it got the bookmarks here and the left hand side of the browser. Unlike the Google Chrome for example that has the book marks on the right hand side. But like I said, you can enable certain things, certain menu options and things like that but no icons. So you can just get those two appearing here on the top, if you want to get add-ons right now. I went to IEAddons.com which is the supported site for adding the additional search providers and tools and extensions. There is not really much yet up there, but for example if I wanted to add a new search provider in here.
I go to the IE Add-ons and there is Yahoo for example, there is more than just Yahoo. You can go down the list and see what else there is that you might want to add. But if I wanted to add Yahoo and obviously I click on this and install the search for the Yahoo. And then click that provider and now when I add that provider, it will put it on the top right corner there as an option. So now you can search and then choose Yahoo if I wanted instead of like default which is Google. So that is nice, easy, quick, very intuitive to do and use – I had no problems with that. Though the toolbars and extensions right now like I said there is not much available there, I mean it’s up to you. You can go through it and see if you like anything – I didn’t find anything that I wanted to use necessarily under these additional accelerators for example that they have.
I didn’t have any use to find people on Facebook and stuff like that, so I just left all of that alone. I didn’t want to add Yahoo Maps for example; I use Google Maps – so stuff like that. I mean you can go to IE8 add-ons and check it out later but as you can see here I added the menu which is not enabled by default. So the file edit view – all of these things, you just right click and then there is the menu bar. You just un-click it, un-check it and you can put it back if you want. So that is the menu bar which Firefox had and here it didn’t.
You can right click and customize what appears on this toolbar of course at the top. So right now by default the home button appears on the right hand side of the feats, the read mail all of that and you can add more to it. So what I mean on the right hand side, I mean over here on the right hand side. So the home button is here instead and of course my PCWizKid’sTechTalk.com blog is my homepage and RSS feed. So when you go to a page that has RSS feed – it becomes orange that icon and you can actually subscribe to that page as default RSS feed. By doing that, by clicking on the icon instead of clicking on the RSS feed of the actual page itself. So it also has a read mail which is using the Microsoft Live Mail, you configure that text as your Gmail if you want, things like that. It has a print button and the page – let’s go through the page and when you click on the page menu. It has links to the some of accelerators which are links to online tools like I mention.
You can edit the page quickly and get the source code for it; you can run it in compatibility mode. So if you are looking at a page that doesn’t look right in IE8, you can switch over to compatibility mode – it might look better. Under safety, you got the in-private browsing so that one is going to hide who you are. It won’t send information and set cookie information, it won’t cache where you been. So this is the In Private option which is also available in the Google Chrome but not in Firefox at the moment. So Firefox 3, I heard that they are working on adding the same feature but right now they don’t. So IE8 has that – so that In Private is the same as the incognito feature to hide and surf anonymously and secret on the internet.
Under the tools, on the right hand side here that the pop-up blocker. You can manage the add-ons; you can work offline, so all of these are standard features. We’ve seen those before but I like the developer tools, if you launch developer tools. You are going to be able to access much more information about a page. So if you are a web-developer and you want to be testing on a page, to see some code, see how it is organized by components and chunks. You can go through that and easily see all the tags, easily see what you are editing and testing basically right? So this is a very nice feature to be able to single out and access certain portions of the page quickly right? You can use that for de-bugging purposes and things like that. So this was very nice of Microsoft to add for developers.
You always need to test and compare backward compatibility of other web site or what pages that you are working on. Now when it comes to memory usage, I wanted the Microsoft Vista performance tools to check on the memory usage for Internet Explorer 7 and compare it to Firefox. So I had the same amount of browser, the options basically and only one page open at a time. And you can see here at the private amount of memory allocated for Firefox is 42MB. And IE is using 51, so 42 against 51 you can tell that IE is using much more RAM than much more memory than Firefox.
So keep that in mind, so whether using Firefox or IE, Google Chrome, Safari or any other browser. The Firefox and IE8 are memory hogs that are for sure so it’s up to you. I am still trying it out and so far so good, so I hope you like this video and thank you for watching.
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