Browse the world with Explorer 8

HYDERABAD: A web browser today is not just confined to an isolated application, but has become a part of the wider IT infrastructure. It is used as a primary interface in internal company portals, external portals, in-house developed software and enterprise level application among others.

Microsoft���s latest browser, IE8, demonstrated at Tech.Ed 2009, has features that will appeal not only to an avid Internet user but also a back-end developer.

Visual Search, Web Slices and Accelerators are among the features that keep an end-user more active with information. For instance, through accelerators, services like maps, blogs, email, social networking can be accessed at a faster pace by eliminating most of the clicks. Also, the browser contains each application on each tab. So, if one site crashes, it���s only the tab and not the browser.

With Web Slices, people can see the information they want to see most often without going away from the page they are on, and developers can mark parts of web pages as web slices. For IT professionals, IE8 helps control and configure these browser features with about 1,500 group policy settings. Group policy is a Microsoft Windows feature which regulates the usage on a computer network.

Many users log on to the internet for six top browsing tasks such as entertainment, sharing memories, shopping, search news and research, social networking or just to email a set of friends and meet other such communication demands. For a safe browsing experience IE 8 has a Smart screen filter which blocks 10 times more attempts by cyber criminals to trick users into installing malware. At least one in every 200 downloads is malware. This protection does not exist for previous versions.

If the Smart Screen filter detects a malicious website, IE 8 will block the entire site. It can also provide a ���surgical block��� of malware or phishing hosted on legitimate websites��� blocking just the malicious content without affecting the rest of the site.