new earth online

It seems pretty common nowadays for a week to not go by where we don't hear something new about Internet Explorer 8, or a new search idea that someone has had (usually not Microsoft). Yesterday the latest news from the IEBlog was on what IE8 has in store for searching. Now to quote their blog, the following changes have been made:

• Search Suggestions present you with suggested queries as you type which help you compose and research your query.
• Visual Search Suggestions are suggestions which include an image and additional text. These can help you visualize what you are searching for and sometimes even get you the information you need without even leaving the search box.
• The QuickPick menu enables you to easily switch to your secondary, non-default, Search providers allowing you to search with the right provider every time.
• History results, directly accessible from the search box, show you pages you've already visited and save you a click or two.
• Automatic Search Accelerators allow you to send selected text on a webpage to any of your search providers skipping the cumbersome copy and paste step.
• Search query synchronization keeps the search box up to date with your most recent query term even if you search within a webpage instead of the search box. You can quickly edit or redirect your searches.

Not bad really - some of these are important usability fixes. "Search Suggestions" is a very Microsoft approach to auto-completing what you might be searching for, but it is kind of useful to see where it's suggested completions for the term come from I guess (not sure why yet though). What is really cool though is the way this feature works with 3rd party search plugins such as the one from Amazon they demonstrate on their page; just imagine if they'd done this for auto-complete as a thumbnail of the site - would it have been useful? Maybe, but it would be something people should have the choice of turning on or off. Switching to alternative search engines is done using their "QuickPick" menu. History results is basically just part of the search suggestions - I'm not sure they really needed a second bullet point for it, <sarcasm>but more bullet points makes it better doesn't it?!</sarcasm>

What do you think to Microsoft's changes?

When I mentioned yesterday that Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 was coming soon I had no idea how soon! Microsoft have today released the Beta which means we get to find out how much quicker it is. They have released versions for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours.

According to IEBlog, this beta release is not so focused at developers like the first Beta, but is aimed at the general public as well. From the looks of it they've made changes to the navigation bar that makes it a great deal like the Firefox AwesomeBar, although in Microsoft's case they've stated where it's found the result. Does it really need to do that? If you're typing a URL do you really care where it's auto-completing it from?

There's been quite a bit posted in the IEBlog about Internet Explorer 8 over the past couple of days, and with all the time I've been spending on redesigning my blog I've not until now had the time to post about these.

The first one I want to comment on is about the fuss they're trying to create around IE8's privacy features. The main point of this article is that they've added a number of features that make it easier to stop pages you've been browsing from being traceable. Now there's only two reasons I can think of that would make you want pages to be private - one of them is the case where you're on a public machine, the other I'll leave to your imagination. These two new features are:

• InPrivate Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data
• Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you've visited websites.
• InPrivate Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it

"Delete Browsing History" sounds to me like a feature that's been in IE for a long time, but it could be they've added more settings to control this. While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:

• New cookies are not stored
  • All new cookies become "session" cookies
  • Existing cookies can still be read
  • The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
• New history entries will not be recorded
• New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
• Form data is not stored
• Passwords are not stored
• Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
• Queries entered into the search box are not stored
• Visited links will not be stored

Apparently these new features will make their way into IE8 Beta 2, which they also say is due to be released shortly.

The next post I want to talk about is what they say about IE8 Performance. Whilst Mozilla have recently claimed that their JavaScript performance is now 26 times faster in a version they're currently working on, Microsoft claim that JScript (their implementation of JavaScript) is 2.5 times faster than in previous versions. Although they can talk about performance increases all they like it doesn't really mean anything until the FINAL release of IE8 is in user's hands. Between now and it's release there could be any number of changes that they make that cause the browser to be slowed down. I'm sure some of you may remember that Firefox 2 Beta's were in some cases faster than the final release of Firefox 2.

As we started building IE8 it was clear that we could do more to take advantage of the increasing prevalence of high bandwidth connections. Two key improvements we made with IE8 were to unblock downloads in the presence of external scripts and to increase the number of parallel connections per server that we support.

Can that be clashed as cheating? I'm not sure, but I think some servers won't allow more than two concurrent connections per user anyway. Still, as I said we'll just have to wait and see what difference this makes - if any.

In preparation for the long (very long) run up to Windows 7, Microsoft have started a blog to let the community know what they're up to with it, and to get meaningful comments back.

So far there isn't much there, just an introduction to the blog and a few comments on what the posting of comments should be used for. It might be worth keeping an eye on though to see what innovations (if any) they make. Oh, and by the way they've not yet got an RSS feed - pesky Microsoft programmers.

Link: Engineering Windows 7 blog