Though few in the tech world, especially if you’re in IT support in London, can understand why, many people out in the wider world still use Internet Explorer for their every day browsing. Whether you’re using it because it’s just what’s been installed on your computer and you never considered anything else or because you genuinely prefer it to the competition, here are a few tips and tricks to make your computing life a little bit easier.
1. Suggested sites. Are you enjoying the site you’re on? You can hit “suggested sites” to find out which sites are similar to the ones you’re already looking at. This does send information back to Microsoft about your browsing habits, though apparently without any information to connect it to you, but the suggestions are pretty accurate and can help expand your horizons. If you don’t have much time to browse the internet for yourself, suggested sites may well make your browsing a little more enjoyable.
2. Try out the accelerator. This is fairly unique to Internet Explorer; basically, if you highlight some text, a blue box will appear to next to it. If you click on the box, you’ll get a range of different options for what you can do with it. For example, if you’ve highlighted an address, you can look for it on maps or search for it for more details or to find out what it is. You can search for that text on Wikipedia, post it to twitter, or send it out through your email. The accelerator’s goal is to speed up your daily life by making tasks you’d normally perform a little bit easier and quicker.
3. Organise your tabs better with tab colouring. Internet Explorer 8 colours tabs to help you remember what purpose they have, even if they’ve become so tiny that you can’t read all the words. If you open a link in a new tab from a page, it will be the same colour as your original tab, so you can keep track of which sites are related. New tabs will be opened in different colours. It’s a small touch, but a good one to learn about and use to your advantage.
4. Take advantage of compatibility mode. If a site doesn’t function well in IE8, as many still don’t, the compatibility button will pop up and switch the browser down to an older mode, so you’ll still be able to use the page. Given how incompatible different versions of Internet Explorer are from one another, this can be a god send, and is well worth using while you’re waiting for the supposedly more compliant IE 9 to appear.
5. Finally, if you’re a developer, you are probably already aware of the fact that IE 8 offers a developer debugger to help you with your code. All developers know that Internet Explorer is notoriously hard to program for and can throw up errors for no particular reason. It can take hours to carefully modify your site to ensure it displays correct on all the different versions of Internet Explorer. This debugger doesn’t fix the problem (and it will never be fixed as long as Microsoft continues fragmenting their browsers) but it may ease the pain a little.
When Internet Explorer 9 is officially released, we’ll update with all new tips and tricks specifically for that version of this popular browser. Stay tuned!