Microsoft's Internet Explorer enjoys about three-quarters of the browser market pie. And having Microsoft at helm, IE enjoys a reputation of being safe and a reliable browser. With beta 2 being released in August this year, the final release of IE 8 is expected by the end of 2008. Internet Explorer has been the follower of trend like in case of tabbed browsing, which was being used by other browser for long time; Microsoft incorporated that in IE 7. With IE 8, that's not the case.

The feature of private browsing mode has been offered first by Microsoft and later Google provided the same in Chrome. This private browsing in IE 8 is branded as InPrivate Browsing and no-record of the users' browsing of web sites is saved. This feature is highly useful when using a bank site or doing an online transaction. IE 8 also offers a Smart Address Bar that offers similar functionality like Chrome's Omnibar.

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whereby one can type in URLs or search keywords and then be showed a suggested list of URLs. Another feature that Microsoft has introduced withIE 8 is of proŽviding third party add-on options called as "Gallery" and is simŽilar to Firefox's Extensions. Comparing speed of renderingJavaScript based web pages with Chrome or Firefox, IE 8 lags behind. But IE 8 is very quick while starting up the browser application. It is slower to rival browsers only when speed is considered while rendering web pages.