I’ve been using the new version of Internet Explorer for the past couple of days and have formulated a few very initial impressions.

First and foremost, IE8 is definitely a nice improvement over its predecessor.  It is faster, more user-friendly and boasts a number of very useful new features.

Among the best new features that I’ve discovered thus far:

• Accelerators are task shortcuts that are enabled when you highlight text on a web page.  The ‘accelerators’ located within IE8 allow you to automatically perform several tasks using the highlighted text including enter it as a search query into a number of different search engines, map it (assuming the highlighted text includes a geographic location), add it to an email or blog, translate it and several other options. You can also search for additional accelerators to suit your specific needs.

• Quick tabs allows you to view thumbnails of all the pages you have open in the browser. This is especially helpful if you have many tabs open at the same time and have forgotten the exact content of one or more of the tabs.

• Tab Groups is very handy when multiple pages from the same site are open at the same time. IE8 automatically color-codes those related tabs so you can easily see which tabs contain similar content.  In addition, when a new tab is opened from an existing tab, the new tab is placed directly to the right of the original tab so that related tabs are kept together.

I still have a lot of exploring to do but overall I think Microsoft has vastly improved Internet Explorer and has provided a number of new features which will enhance users’ web-browsing experience.

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