Friday, March 20, 2009

Internet Explorer 8

I thought I'd never say this about any version of IE, but I like it. It borrows heavily from Google's Chrome browser, and with good reason; Chrome is fast, reliable and has a nice set of features. The slices (borrowed from Safari) and accelerators (borrowed from Firefox) are pretty good ideas and it's great that you can manage them by adding or removing whichever accelerators you'd like. It's also faster than IE7 (still slower than Chrome, though) and, lo and behold, if an application inside a tab crashes, you get the chance to just close that tab and not lose all your other tabs. That is of course also borrowed from Chrome. Based upon this and their next big release, Windows 7, it looks like perhaps Microsoft is moving in a new direction in which they give usability much more importance than before. If it is, It is a welcome change. It takes the aggressive competition of Apple for them to wake up.