IE8 Beta 2 Download – Colored Tabs, an “Awesome Bar”, and More

This article was written on August 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

ie8 awesome bar.png

When Mozilla launched Firefox 3 there were some people who weren’t fond of the changes they made to the address bar. With it they decided to intermingle results from the user’s history, bookmarks, and typed addresses to provide a long list of sites they might be trying to find. While not everyone liked the feature there were quite a few who did, and among those people the name “Awesome Bar” caught on.

Well, the download for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was just posted, and it is sporting an “Awesome Bar” that is even more powerful than Firefox’s. The screenshot above shows how it grabs results from your history, favorites, and also from any feeds you’ve subscribed to within IE. All of the different types of results are divided up so that the user can quickly determine what’s what, which was often a complaint with how Mozilla decided to implement their solution. If you see a result that you want to delete just hover over it, and a red “X” should appear at the end.

One of my new favorite things would also have to be the colorized tabs. When you Control+Click on a link from a site the new tab will not only open next to the current one, but it will also inherit the same color. That way you can visually associate tabs with each other.

ie8 tabs.png

And lastly when you open a new tab Internet Explorer 8 will ask whether you want to do things like open a tab you accidentally closed, use an accelerator, or start browsing privately:

ie8 new tab.png

I have to give Microsoft a lot of credit for what they’ve done here. I was thinking that the only new feature we were going to see in IE8 Beta 2 was the InPrivate Browsing that we previously covered. They definitely shocked me with the other features they added, and they did a really great job with them. I can’t wait to see what the final release is like.

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