What's the best beta? IE 8 vs Opera 9.5 vs Safari vs Firefox 3

By Nate Lanxon on 17 March 2008, 11:47am

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Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, beta 1
What's new?
The first interesting addition to IE is 'Web Slices'. It's essentially a Microsoft version of RSS and serves a similar purpose. Web developers can assign areas of their sites to be 'sliceable', so updates to that area are available to the browser in the form of a tab. In a provided example, friend statuses in Facebook can be sliced, adding a pull-down tab on IE 8's new 'Favourites Bar' that displays three of the most recent status updates along with their photo. We're not entirely sure of the point of this, as RSS already works perfectly well.

'Activities' are also new, and add actions to the browser's contextual menus, such as 'Send to digg' and 'Share on Facebook'. It's a handy feature, though only 'Search with Live Search' is included with the install, and every example on Microsoft's site produced Javascript errors for us. But this is a beta release after all, and we can see this being a useful feature, even if similar functionality is already available by using add-ons in Firefox ('Digg This!' springs instantly to mind).

Crash-tested
Microsoft has also integrated 'Automated Crash Recovery'. This lets each IE window or tab be handled by separate Windows processes, so if one tab in a window of ten tabs crashes or hangs, it can be terminated without the entire browser needing to be manually closed and restarted. The feature worked well when we forced IE to terminate its processes in Task Manager, though real-life crash recovery remains to be seen.

Along with improving compliance with Web-design standards, IE 8 is a decent improvement over IE 7. Web Slices may be useful if enough sites adopt it, but RSS is commonplace and isn't tied to one installation of a browser -- Web Slices will only be in place if you're using your home computer, whereas anything subscribed to with RSS can be accessible from any PC in the world if the right services are used. And seriously, where's the download manager? IE needs a download manager.

We do like the lower memory and CPU overheads though -- IE 8 was less resource-intensive than Firefox in our tests, so new computer users or those with less capable machines may be perfect candidates for IE 8.

How it compares
It may save 'company time' being wasted on fixing a crashed Firefox, and it's probably compatible with your corporate VPN software, too, so it's a decent choice in a business environment. There will surely be a beta or two more before the final release, so if you're already using IE 7, keep your office-focused eyes peeled. It's not going to be a crucial download for us, however, if nothing major changes between now and the final release.