Microsoft Internet Explorer 

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 in March 2009.  Since then it's received favorable reviews. IE8 is straightforward to install, and incorporates all of your settings from IE7. (Favorites, toolbars, etc) 

Here are some notable features: 

Improved Tabs

 If you regularly use multiple tabs, you'll welcome the way IE8 handles them. When you open a new tab, the new tab opens directly to the right of the original tab, and both tabs are given the same color.  Therefore, all of your related tabs are grouped together and share the same color tab, making it easy to move between tabs.  This could have a major impact on your productivity!

Working with tabs is very easy.  You can drag a tab to a different group and it automatically takes on the color of the new group, you can close an entire group with a right-click, you can ungroup the chosen tab from the group. You can perform actions on any individual tab from the right-click menu. You can reopen closed tabs. 

Each tab is isolated from the others, so if one tab crashes, the entire browser doesn't go down. You can then restore the crashed tab, and when you do, it reloads with the information that had been in it when it crashed.  So if you were in the middle of writing an email it can be recovered!

The downside to this is that this requires more memory usage and may be a problem for older computers that have 512MB or less.

Address Bar

The address bar has had a makeover. It's no longer just for typing in a Web address. As with Firefox and Chrome, the address bar now operates as an all-in-one search tool that searches the Web as well as previously visited Web sites, Favorites and RSS feeds.

 Accelerators and Web Slices

Perhaps the most noticeable new features in IE8 are Accelerators and Web Slices, both designed to let you get information from Web pages and services without having to visit them.

The accelerators allow you to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.

Here is how it works:  You are on a website with an address on it. Highlight the address, and a blue icon appears:

Click on the blue icon and pick an accelerator, in this case Google maps, and a new tab opens up showing a map of the address highlighted.  Eliminating the need to cut and paste the address and opening a new tab and finding Google maps. Some accelerators open up a flyaway or a pop up box on the website that you can interact with just like you were on the site.

The downside right now is that this is new and not all web services have created accelerators yet. As more companies and applications create accelerators, the more useful this feature will be.  Current accelerators include: Google maps, Gmail, Google News, Blogger, Facebook, Ebay, Digg, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google Translate, and more.

Web Slices are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to.  This preview fly-out gives you at-a-glance access to the information that was updated on the bookmarked URL, and has therefore been dubbed "live bookmarks".    Web Slices will be kept updated automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.   So, for example, if you want to watch stock prices, you can click on the web slice in the favorites bar and get the information without having to open or switch to another tab.

Again, there simply aren't many Web Slices available right now. As with Accelerators, Microsoft will have to get developers and Web sites to write Slices.  

Anti-phishing Filter

Microsoft has improved on the anti-phishing filter introduced in IE7, and has named it the SmartScreen filter. In addition to better anti-phishing capabilities, SmartScreen also warns users when they are about to visit a Web site known to harbor malware. SmartScreen regularly updates its database of sites known to contain malware.

Another new privacy feature is called InPrivate Filtering, which is designed to allow you to control which Web sites can share information about your browsing habits.  InPrivate Filtering lets you block the site you're visiting from sending information to third-party sites.

Another cool new privacy-related feature is not as obvious – it’s the way in which you can better control how you delete cookies.  In the past, browsers had taken an all-or-nothing approach to deleting cookies -- there hasn't been a simple way to remove some cookies and keep others. With a new feature in the Delete Browsing History screen, you can delete all cookies and temporary Internet files except those that you have on your Favorites list.

Another nice feature is in the address bar.  Some URLs are so long and complex that it can be tough to decipher which domain you're visiting, which makes it easier for site spoofers to trick you. But with IE8 you can see at a glance the real domain that you're currently visiting -- it shows up dark in the Address Bar, while the rest of the URL is gray.