Features for Users
Instant search
Search suggestions. Now you can type a search term and see real-time, relevant search suggestions from your chosen search provider and your browsing history. Click on a suggestion at any time to immediately execute the search without having to type the entire word or phrase.
Visual search. Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 is partnering with top search providers like Live Search, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Amazon, and more to deliver direct results and "visual search" images that provide you with immediate answers. For example, typing "Seattle weather" with Live Search will instantly show you a preview of the current weather directly in the Search Box drop-down. Look for more visual search results with your preferred search providers.
Accelerators
Accelerators are contextual services that quickly access a service from any Web page. Because users typically copy and paste from one Web page to another, Internet Explorer 8 has made this common pattern easier to do. The Accelerators feature performs two main functions: it "looks up" information within a Web page and "sends" Web content to a Web application. For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see its location. The user selects the address and views an in-place map, using his favorite map service.
Or, let’s suppose a user reads an interesting article and wants to blog about a portion of it. The user selects the portion and uses the blog Accelerator. This navigates to the user’s blog site, with the selection already available in the edit field. Accelerators are services that the user can install and manage. Users can install them from the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Service Guide, or through any Web site that offers Accelerators.
Web Slices
The Web Slice is a new feature in which Web pages connect to their users by having them subscribe to content directly within a Web page. Web Slices behave just like feeds, where clients can subscribe to get updates and are notified of changes.
Internet Explorer 8 users can discover Web Slices within a Web page and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to the Web page, detects changes in the Web Slice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and click through the Web site to get more information. For example, a Web Slice could be used for an item up for auction on an auction site. A Web Slice on the page would let you subscribe to receive updates on a set-time basis, and notify you of price changes.
Automatic Crash Recovery
The Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) feature of Internet Explorer 8 can help prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event that the browser crashes or hangs. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.
InPrivate Filtering
Web sites increasingly pull content in from multiple sources, providing tremendous value to consumer and sites alike. Users are often not aware that some content, images, ads and analytics are being provided from third-party Web sites, or that these sites may have the ability to track users’ behavior across multiple Web sites. InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third-party sites can potentially use to track browsing activity.
To use this feature, open a new tab and select InPrivate Filtering, or select InPrivate Browsing from the Safety menu. To end your InPrivate Browsing session, simply close the browser window.
Improved Phishing Filter: SmartScreen Filter
Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature that helped warn users when they visited a phishing site. Such sites spoof trusted, legitimate sites, and are designed to steal the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft® built on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the SmartScreen® Filter. If the SmartScreen Filter is active and users attempt to visit a Web site that is not considered safe, users are prompted to take specific alternative actions.