Hi folks! I’m coming to you live from the MIX09 conference in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. I will be composing a much more robust post later summarizing what I’ve learned here, but for now, I wanted to simply share with you some of the cool things that came up in this morning’s Keynote address.
This morning, as part of the MIX keynote, Microsoft released the latest version of their browser, Internet Explorer 8. There are a bunch of nice features that have been added to the browser, although I’m not sure that it’s enough to make someone switch from a different browser if they’re not already an IE user. However, if you use IE as your primary web browser, I highly recommend installing this latest version, as the new features are pretty compelling.
One thing that I really like is that each tab in IE 8 runs in an isolated process. This is a fancy way of saying that if a page in a tab crashes, it won’t take the other tabs down with it. Chrome already does this, and it’s VERY nice.
IE 8 has also added a feature called InPrivate browsing (Safari already has this). This is a good thing if you are browsing a bunch of inappropriate sites and you want to “cover your tracks”.
There are some other nice tweaks, including Web Slices (a way to “subscribe” to certain websites), Accelerators (to move information from one site to another, such as an address to a map site, etc), and improved search capabilities.
Finally – here is a link to a hilarious video they used to introduce IE 8 at the keynote. It’s quite entertaining and not just because it includes a unicorn (seriously).
https://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/nethistory