Everybody who has a blog and their dog will pick up on the news about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1’s release and its two new features, Activities and WebSlices. Instead of parroting back the same old platitudes, I wanted to talk about some of the small interface improvements in the new beta.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (96 DPI) Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (120 DPI)

The first thing that jumped out at me was was its page zoom. They fixed the horizontal scrolling bug, making the feature actually usable instead of just being something they can lord over Safari and Firefox for not having. It’s not as glitch-free as Firefox 3’s and Opera’s page zoom, but it’s a step in the right direction. In addition, page zoom now adapts to the Windows DPI setting. Having the font size set to 120 DPI in the Control Panel instead of 96DPI automatically resizes web content to 125% while the page zoom controls remain at 100%. I think it’s great that a web browser respects the user’s choice and largely eliminates the need for users to fiddle with the page zoom settings. The developers still have some work cut out for them because this change absolutely wrecks Sidebar gadgets. Though it isn’t new to IE8, increasing the DPI also makes the toolbars bigger. This is something I wish Firefox would do without having to resort to editing userChrome.css.

Windows Sidebar (96 DPI & 120 DPI)

Finally, IE8 makes a small change in how URLs are displayed in the location bar. It works the same way as it always has, but now the domain is highlighted. This makes it easier to users who want to find out if the page they’re visiting belongs to the domain they intend to visit instead of some phishing site. Of course SSL certificates remain the best solution for most high-security needs, but this is a welcome change. I think there was some talk of including this functionality in Firefox 3, but I’m not sure if the idea went anywhere. It’s available as an extension, Locationbar², but it suffers from a problem common to most Firefox extensions: insensible defaults and too many configuration options.

Firefox the way I like it.

Above is a screenshot of how I like my Firefox to be configured. Notice the larger tab size that can be achieved by editing userChrome.css.