IE8 users have been reporting that they are no longer able to see the New Tab page which displays most visited sites and other options whenever a new tab is opened. If you have been wondering that something has gone wrong, don’t panic, it is a deliberate decision by Google to adhere to new IE add-on guidelines and requirements posted by Microsoft, which can be viewed here.

IE8 users will no longer be able to view the new tab page which was added by Google Toolbar since Microsoft’s add-on guidelines clearly state that add-ons cannot make any changes to the tabs or address bar. Here is a snippet from the guidelines page (some emphasis added by me):

Removing and/or replacing Internet Explorer features

Software must not remove or replace any Internet Explorer features by disabling or limiting access to the feature user interface in Internet Explorer.

This includes, but is not limited to, replacing features such as the Internet Explorer address bar, search box, new tab page and favorites center.

As you can see, Microsoft clearly limits add-ons from making any change to the address bar, search box, new tab page and favorites center.

The new changes in Google Toolbar basically removes the new tab page because of this restriction. If you are a user who misses this feature, you are urged to use Firefox or Google Chrome.

I am a very light IE user, however, I find the new tab feature in Google Chrome and Firefox pretty useful, since it allows me to quickly open a frequently visited sites without having to use the bookmarks or having to type in the URL. A similar feature can also be found in Opera, however in Opera it is called Speed Dial, and users have to manually add the pages to the Speed Dial.

Considering that IE’s user base is constantly declining, limiting add-ons from adding more features is definitely a bad move, considering how popular the feature has been. So would you switch from IE7 or IE8 to Firefox or Chrome to make use of this feature? Do let me know.

(Source)

There is definitely something missing in Internet Explorer 7. When I’m using Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, I have gotten used to highlighting a word or phrase, then right clicking and choosing a search engine to look it up. I noticed that it was missing in IE7 the other day, and I immediately set forth on a quest to fix this fault.

It didn’t take long to find the answer. Once again, an old acquaintance, Ramesh Srinivasan, had a solution handy at his WinHelpOnline website. The right-click-search (or context menu search) is fairly easy to add. Just follow my instructions below. (This should work in IE6 and IE7, but may not work IE8.)

1. Download Google.zip from WinHelpOnline.
2. Right click on the zip file and Extract Allthe files to a folder. (the Windows Desktop is a good spot)
3. Open the folder and copy google.htm to the C:\Windows\Web folder.
4. Double click on the google.reg file and click Yesto add this information into the registry.
5. The next time you open up Internet Explorer, you’ll now be able to right click on a highlighted word and search for it.
6. An undo.regis included in the zip file, and you can run it if you want to remove the google search from your menu.

Wait! I’m not done with you yet. I can tell you how to add other search engines to the right click menu. I modified Ramesh’s code and created more search context actions. Thanks to Ramesh for permission to re-use his code.

Here are searches for:

• Ask.com
• Bing.com
• Dictionary.com
• FreewareWiki.com
• Scroogle.org
• Techie-Buzz.com
• Thesaurus.com
• Wikipedia.org
• Yahoo.com

To install these, just use the same instructions (2 through 6) above. Substitute the name of the site you are installing for google.

Note: IE8 already has a similar feature called accelerators. At this time, I don’t know how to write those.

Do you need any other websites added to this list? Let me know, when I have time I’ll add more.

If you are looking to test your webpages in multiple versions of IE, including IE8 Beta 2, IE7, IE6 and IE5.5 we have a solution for you that works flawlessly in both Windows Vista and Windows XP. Sometime back we had mentioned about another such tool called IE Collections, but unfortunately it did not work in Windows Vista.

Related: Install Internet Explorer on Linux

IETester is a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

In addition to testing with the four listed browser versions, you can also run tests for the currently installed version of IE on your website. Definite must have for designers and developers who need to test on multiple versions of IE.

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Well many of us cringe when they hear about Internet Explorer but the real fact is that it performs better when memory comes into the question. Nirmal has done an extensive test on browsers to come up the fact that Firefox uses up the most memory among browsers.

I have been using IE7 along with Firefox for a long time. The reason I started using both the browsers was because I started up a new account for Google AdSense which could not be accessed within the same browser.

I had used the beta version of IE7 before for quite some time and I can tell you all the beta versions were crap. The browser either crashed or did something it was not supposed to.

The final version of IE7 is much more stable and performs much better than most of the other browsers. Well what more we are now going to get nextG of Internet Explorer Browser which is now officially called Internet Explorer 8.

The official announcement went out that they were going to call the new browser Internet Explorer 8. I was surprised for a moment as to why they were deliberating about it what would they call it? Well here are some of the names they thought appropriate enough for the new browser

IE 7+1
IE VIII
IE 1000 (think binary)
IE Eight!
iIE
IE for Web 2.0 (Service Pack 2)
IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet (the marketing team really pushed for this one ;-)
Ie^2.079 (we might still use this for the Math Major Edition)

How hard it is to come up with a name. They have had IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and now IE7. The best bet is that it has to be IE8 not some weird name, it’s a browser after all not some web2.0 service they are launching.

There are not other major announcements about the features that they will integrate into IE8 but gauging from the names they were trying out I think there may be more integration with social networking sites and web2.0 services. IE8 may eventually do what Flock did to Firefox.

I put my 2 cents on integration with Digg, Stumble Upon, Live Spaces, Windows Live and other social networking services and definitely with Microsoft Office coming forth into IE8.

Talking about performance I still think that if Firefox does not pull up its socks in the next release I may ditch it for IE, it has worked better in memory consumption, no crashes at all (I can’t believe it), picks up https certificate errors. Banking has not given me any trouble yet and shopping has been pleasant without any hacks.

Well I attribute one of the reasons to this being the automatic security updates I have chosen. It updates all the vulnerabilities in the browser regularly. If you are using IE then I recommend you should turn on the automatic update service.