If you know anything about me, you know I have no fondness for Microsoft. If you really know me, though, you know that, much as I like open-source software and dislike proprietary programs, I’m a pragmatist. What I really like best in technology is what works best. That’s why I put up with Apple’s closed door policies and use an iPod, and why I now have to say that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is better than Firefox 3.07.
How can I say that? I can say it because I’ve been using Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 systems for several months now and it Just Works Better. Of course, working better than IE 7 wasn’t much of a trick. IE 7 was a dog. After years of lagging behind Firefox though, IE has finally caught up with Firefox’s current production version.
Specifically, IE 8 does a great job of handling tabs. I can all too easily get lost in a forest of tabs with Google Chrome or Firefox. With IE 8, when you open one tab from a link in another, the ‘related’ tabs have the same color. By automatically organizing the tabs by color-coding, managing tabs just became a lot easier. This is one of those incredibly useful ideas that, after it arrives, you wonder how it ever could have taken so long for it to appear.
[...] of course, isn’t everything, and some, including the Practical Technology blog, tip their hat to Microsoft’s other innovations in IE 8, such as its management of [...]