Logan Buesching

I have been an avid fan of Mozilla Firefox for a long time, but since I got a new job, I have been trying to exclusively use Microsoft products (at least at work).  One of the things that I have been able to try out is Internet Explorer 8, Beta 2.  From a first impression, I have really enjoyed it.

Faster Tabs

If you’ve ever heard me gripe about IE, it’s that it has slow tabs.  When I open up a new tab in Firefox, it’s blazing fast and I’m already typing in the address bar before I know it.  For IE 7, it had such a slow implementation for its tabs.  It would literally take 2 full seconds from when I create a new tab to when I could use it.  With IE 8, tabs open much more quickly.  Although the tabs aren’t as fast as Firefox, it’s not going to be my huge gripe.

Privacy and Safety Feature

A new feature called InPrivate browsing allows me to browse the web without worrying about tracker cookies or saving my history.  I’m not exactly sure what all this entails, but it seems to have gotten media attention.

Another helpful feature is that in the address bar, they have made the domain name stick out more to help avoid phishing attacks.

Add-On’s Welcome

Microsoft has a new site dedicated to providing Add On’s.  With all older generations of IE, nobody really cared about having plug in’s for the web browsers.  When Firefox came along, the whole game changed.  Firefox gave developers a lot of flexibility for extending the browsers functionality.  IE has finally caught wind of this and I am excited to see some of the additional add on’s that are going to come out.

Accelerators

When I first saw this feature, I wasn’t very excited at all.  I thought it was going to become another toolbar helper that just gets in my way.  After using it for a little while, I have stopped noticing when the little icon pops up.  It is very non-invasive and there when I need it.  I think the best thing about the accelerator is that it doesn’t take me to a new page to find a map or define a term, it’s all right there in the same page.

Web Slices

This feature is seems like it could be really cool, but still needs polishing up for the final release of IE8.  I started out getting the Digg and Facebook web slice.  Neither one of these slices worked as expected.  The Digg slice didn’t quite show the full news when I clicked it.

And the facebook slice BROKE FACEBOOK! 

Not exactly sure how that managed, but after deleting the slice I was able to get Facebook to work again.

Smiles Sprinkled All Over The Browser

In my opinion, those are the most major new features that are in IE8, but there are a few last items that I though deserved attention.

In IE7, searching was horrific.  I hated the popup dialog that always showed up, but now in IE8, it has become a lot more like Firefox in that the search is integrated into the window.

Firefox 3.0 introduced a new type of address bar that searches as you type, and IE8 also introduced this.  I have to say that IE8’s implementation is a little bit better because not only does it show me my web history, it also shows my feeds that I have saved, and also suggestions based on my web browsing history!  +1 for IE!

Even the search bar got it’s own suggestions and history that can be shown!

Final Thoughts

I believe that IE 7 showed the world that Microsoft is giving IE the attention that it deserves.  With IE 8, I believe that they have finally caught up with Firefox in terms of baseline browser ability.  I still have to give the edge to Firefox for now as the better browser because of it’s extensions, but if Microsoft can make as dramatic of push from IE 7 to IE 8 when it goes from IE 8 to IE 9, wow, look out!  I am excited to see the future of browsing the web!

Bennett and I happened to head to BARCamp Chicago 2007 over the weekend, but we only ended up staying for the Saturday sessions. Being at BARCamp was very intimidating. Not often are you put into a single location with so many brilliant people. I really enjoyed my time there and hope I can attend the camp next year.

During Saturday’s sessions, I listened to Sean Johnson‘s talk on his opinions on startups and how to create a business model that supports your own life instead of your own life supporting your startup. It was a very interesting talk and had some insights which I had not thought of.

Later I listened into a talk by Tristian Sloughter on how to brew your own beer. That was fun and I learned a bit about the differences between brewing ales, lagers, and what exactly a lambic is. I know my roommate next semester at school has already looked into brewing his own beer which I will most likely help out when I go back to school.

John Quigley had a talk about Lisp that Bennett was interested in hearing. Unfortunately he had lost his original slides, which forced him to use a document which wasn’t really meant to be put used as a presentation. Still, it gave me a little bit of insight into a language which I knew just about nothing about.

Mike Mangino talked about ActiveRecord in Ruby. This was an interesting talk and one that I was probably most interested in when I first head about it as I am currently implementing an active record implementation into the MyEPICS 2.0 framework. Most of his talk was about Ruby’s technical implementation of ActiveRecord and how to dive into the Ruby code instead of a more general academic talk of the active record pattern. I felt it was hard for myself to follow along with much of what he was saying because I have never worked with Ruby, and the syntax is quite daunting for a new entry. Still, I was able to get that there is a lot of auto-magic that is put into ActiveRecord, which makes me happy as I have implemented a bit voodoo myself.

Overall, I enjoyed the talks, pizza and beer that was offered at BARCamp Chicago 2007 and will be attending when they do it next year.