So everyone by now knows that Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 is available for download, and you all have read positive and/or negative reactions (why do people bother to repeat complaints such as; Firefox already has that feature, Safari is still better, yadda yadda…).

Anyhow I have tried it out during the day and have had a really nice experience. Aside from the improved performance (will be back with more on that later on, but Firefox is still way ahead) I have found some really nice improvements.

Reload and Stop button locations

Reload and Stop button Finally you can move the Reload and Stop buttons to the left of the Address bar and have them together with the forward/back buttons. I have since IE7 always been annoyed at this. To move the buttons just right click on the menu/toolbar and select Customize->Show Stop and Refresh Buttons before Address bar.

Oh man, this one is by far the most longed for update. Instead of the dreadful Find dialog you have a Find bar which is opened with Ctrl-F and closed with Esc. Incremental search, Highlighting, easy navigation between hits, Yes!

Find bar

Improved View Source

The View Source in beta 2 is no longer plain-old notepad, but instead a better color-coded source viewer with a nice search. I only wish it would close when I hit the Esc button (IE-Team - do you listen?).

View Source

Caret Browsing

With Caret Browsing enabled, enable/disable with F7, you can use the keyboard arrow keys to walk around in the web page, which allows for easier text selection.

What’s you favorite IE8 pieces?

Technorati tags: IE, Internet Explorer