Look Out, Firefox 3 — IE8 Is Back On Top For Now

CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla reviewed it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode,' new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. There's one big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."

Comments

Re:Security?

[Alphager]

You don't seem to understand what Accelerators are. They are additional markup which denotes that additional information can be downloaded on demand by the user. An example would be the map-accelerator: if you mark an adress with the additional markup, a user can right-click on the area and open google maps in an iframe. Nothing automatic, nothing wierd or non-standard. There even exist a firefox-addon for that functionality: http://www.cleeki.com/firefox.html