Difference Between Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Internet Explorer 9 (IE9)

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) vs Internet Explorer 9 (IE9)

Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 are web browsers that are developed by Microsoft. However, there are certain differences between the two apart from the different versions. Both the browsers are free to download from the Microsoft’s website.

Internet Explorer 8

The version 8 of the internet explorer offered users certain additional features than the previous versions. The different features are:

1. Search Suggestions – As you type words in the search box, the browser automatically offers relevant suggestions to you. This greatly helps in saving time. You don’t need to type the entire word in order to search rather you can click on the suggestion to execute the search.

2. Accelerators – IE 8 also employs the use of accelerators. By using accelerators, you can easily perform your browsing jobs without even navigating to websites. For example, “Map with Bing” is an accelerator that can be used for in-place view that is displayed directly on the webpage.

3. Increased performance – The performance of the browser has been improved drastically specially in the areas that matter the most. The pages load more quickly as the script engine that is running the browser is made faster than the previous versions.

4. Address Bar – With smarter address bar, you no longer need to type the entire URL of the website that you have already visited rather just type-in few characters of the website and as the browser searches your Favorites, RSS feeds and history, the address of the website is shown to you so that you can easily navigate to the corresponding website. In this way, you don’t need to remember the entire URL of the website.

5. InPrivate Browsing – This feature allows you to leave no evidence of your browsing as the explorer does not retains your browsing history, cookies, form data, usernames, temporary internet files and passwords.

Internet Explorer 9

This version is next to Internet Explorer 8 and it is currently in its beta phase. Apart from most of the features of Internet Explorer 8, the version 9 of the browser offers additional ones too which includes intuitive navigation, streamlined design, few dialog boxes to click and many other features. Hardware acceleration is also present in Internet Explorer 9 which delivers faster browsing experience. Following are the other features in Internet Explorer 9:

1. Pinned Sites – You can pin web pages that you visited regularly to the Windows 7 taskbar so that you can access them quickly. The websites can be pinned by dragging the icon present on the left side of the web address to the taskbar.

2. Download Manager – The version 9 also includes the download manager which was not present in the version 8. A list of the files that are being downloaded is kept in the manager and it also allows you to pause and restart a file that you are downloading.

3. Tab page – For quicker navigation, the sites that you visit regularly are displayed on the New Tab page and a color code is assigned to each website.

4. Address Bar Search – The address bar also acts as a search tab. You will be navigated directly to the webpage if you have entered the full address but if you have entered an incomplete address or a search term then your current search engine will search for it.

5. Enhanced tabs – This allows you to look at two tabbed pages on two windows and to view side by side. Tear-off tabs allow you to drag a tab out of Internet Explorer to open the tab’s webpage in a new window, and Snap it for side-by-side viewing.

6. Notification Bar – Instead of pop ups, notifications appear in the Notification Bar at the bottom of the browser frame. More to this the messages will be more informative, easy to understand and easy to act on.

7. Add-on Performance Advisor – This will advice you if an add-on is slowing down your browser performance, and then allow you to disable or remove it.