IE8: Your Behavior Made It Better : Can You Spot the Way to Safety?

By Mary Branscombe , published on March 27, 2009 at 3:41 PM
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The anti-phishing filter in IE7 would warn you if a site were suspected of hosting malware and would ask you whether you wanted to close the window or visit the site anyway. But the red shading in the address bar and the red shield didn’t catch people’s attention and neither did the option to close the page. The heat map of where people were looking showed that they didn't even see that option (the red spots are where people looked most and they’re all over the page). Adding a red background and making the option to go back to your home page bigger and clearer had people looking at the safe option (highlighted by the red spots showing where they looked) and clicking on it. Hachamovitch claimed the beta 2 version of IE8 has so far protected one user in 40 from downloading malware each week.

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Comments
CaptainObvious 03/28/2009 2:15 AM
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And... it's slow as syrup in Antarctica.
I switched back to IE7, and will wait until the speed issue has been dealt with.
Another rushed MS product...

judeh101 03/28/2009 4:40 PM
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I agree with you :)
And yet, my dad uses it.. :S

thedipper 03/28/2009 6:12 PM
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Of course it's a bit slower, it's called focusing on features and useage rather than straight speed.

Tomsguiderachel 03/28/2009 8:34 PM
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The point here is: While IE might never truly be competitive with Firefox, this is a bit of a window into the company's efforts (hey, they're trying). MSFT can put its resources behind quality assurance/focus groups/testing if it wants to, and perhaps the result will be an improved product for the core users that will stick to IE because it comes pre-installed on their machines.

DN_ 03/28/2009 9:26 PM
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It's called "Beta" for a reason, hu hu hu...

Anonymous 03/29/2009 12:01 PM
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The best feature of internet explorer is... "The Not Using It" feature.

Coilz 03/29/2009 4:36 AM
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The Favorites bar needs a lot of work, I can't even drag/edit stuff directly and instead need to enter another menu just to customize it. They should take the firefox route, and make a proper bookmarks/favorite feature. Other than that it's a pretty decent browser and I enjoy it much more than any other IE so far.

zorro_84 03/29/2009 7:53 AM
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caused my sidebar to constantly crash back to seven

pcworm 03/29/2009 9:01 AM
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Microsoft is stupid like hell! I've always been a fan of their good products and IE is certainly not one of them, if you save a page, Stupid IE re downloads all components, whats more, if you have other tabs active in that window, you cant access them until the save is complete! try saving pages on a slow connection and you feel what I feel!
I never really use IE but downloaded it just to see whether they fixed it...
sorry they haven't

Anonymous 03/30/2009 7:23 AM
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@coilz
You can drag items on the Favorites bar in IE 8 by clicking, dragging with the mouse button held and then dropping - just make sure you drop them between two buttons rather than on top of one, so when you see the I bar rather than the warning circle. Click the >> mark and you can drag buttons that are on the overflow menu too.

bourgeoisdude 03/30/2009 3:26 PM
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Um...IE8 is much faster than IE7, and tests prove it. Not sure what's making it slower for you guys...

sanctoon 03/30/2009 8:20 PM
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IE8 is the first microsoft browser i have used since FF1.5 came out,
for me its faster than FF3. FF is more functional, but I prefer speed.

I hope hope FF3.1 kicks some serious but.

kamkal 03/30/2009 9:36 PM
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bleh why use ie when there is ff?

kittle 03/30/2009 10:18 PM
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My only "behavior" for IE8 has been to click the "dont show this update again" checkbox.

TheCapulet 03/31/2009 9:18 AM
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"While IE might never truly be competitive with Firefox"

So I guess Winning over market share by a very large margin isnt competitive enough for you?

crickee 03/31/2009 6:42 PM
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CHROME OWNED IE!!

mitch074 04/01/2009 10:05 AM
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IE 8 is faster than IE 7 in all cases, except where it counts: in opening new tabs (effectively starting a new IE process, and all attached ActiveX modules with it). This is a known design deficience that Google worked around in Chrome by using Webkit (arguably the lightest and fastest HTML/CSS parsing and rendering engine out there), and that Firefox and IE 7 don't encounter because all tabs are kept inside the same process.

However, I personally stay with Firefox for several reasons: it's actually pretty hard to go and crash it on purpose, and when that DOES happen, Firefox's session restore has until now never failed me (right down to lengthy texts typed in a textbox being restored to the last character) - so, tab isolation isn't that useful for me.

Next, although IE 8 comes with vastly improved developer tools (from a meaningless Jscript error message box to a Firebug clone), Firefox still comes with better developer tools.

Then, Firefox doesn't focus on this or that trendy piece of code's acceleration (IE 8 focused on rendering the 20 most used websites fast), but on all of them.

Last, and that's probably what counts most for me, Firefox runs on all my machines natively: be it Windows 2000 to Seven, or Mac OS X or GNU/Linux, I can take my Firefox profile and port it from one machine to the next. On the other hand, taking an IE 8 'profile' and porting it to a Windows 2000 machine doesn't work (no IE 8 on Windows 2000), moving it from an XP machine to a Vista one is bound to create bugs, and moving off-Windows is a no-go.

jkeelsnc 04/01/2009 8:39 PM
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IE8. What a crock! I downloaded and installed it last week. LOL The first time I loaded it it crashed and then when I killed it from the task manager it automatically restarted itself without asking me. Then it crashed again. Forget it, IE8 can go to hell. LOL It is a huge joke. IE7 was crap but IE8 only makes it worse. What was M$ thinking?

timaahhh 04/03/2009 5:45 PM
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TheCapulet :
"While IE might never truly be competitive with Firefox"So I guess Winning over market share by a very large margin isnt competitive enough for you?


ROFL

SLeeeperNUKE 04/03/2009 7:47 PM
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jkeelsnc :
IE8. What a crock! I downloaded and installed it last week. LOL The first time I loaded it it crashed and then when I killed it from the task manager it automatically restarted itself without asking me. Then it crashed again. Forget it, IE8 can go to hell. LOL It is a huge joke. IE7 was crap but IE8 only makes it worse. What was M$ thinking?


I bet you have trouble installing games and other apps also...
Try "cleaning" your machine. The IE8 download and install went smooth as silk for me. It runs fast and has never crashed. Wish I could say the same for all the browser I have installed, I'm a web designer and run everything from IE5.5 to Safari on three different machines. So, I wish everyone would go to IE8 or FF, So I don't have to code for 3 different browsers...


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