Safer surfing with Internet Explorer 8
March 26 2009
A web browser is the most used and important piece of software on all computers these days. The Internet has become part of daily living - we need to search and find information, handle our email, read news, catch up on the weather forecast, do some banking, purchase goods, pay the bills, play games, keep up with our hobby, fill in forms, and, when there's time left over, just browse the web.
Safety
The first aim for the Internet Explorer 8 developers was to produce a safe and secure browser. It's a fact of life that the criminals are now far more clever at trying to steal our money and they use very sophisticated techniques to accomplish this goal so we need protection against any website that is trying to gain our personal information.
In this respect Internet Explorer 8 guards us from sites that appear to be a valid banking sites which ask for personal information such as account name, number and password. This technique, known as phishing, has been around for a couple of years yet billions of dollars are still lost to the criminals despite warnings from authorities to be careful with our personal information.
Internet Explorer 8 warns the user with a red background in the address bar if they attempt to visit such a site. Instead of the site loading, there's a large message displayed to inform the user that the particular site is not safe to use. Internet Explorer then gives the user the option to return to their normal homepage rather than get caught out giving away information they shouldn't.
Sadly there are innocent-looking sites (e.g. hobby sites such as patchworking) that contain malicious software which can download and install without you being aware. Internet Explorer 8 protects you from such malware by running in protected mode (see the bottom right of IE 8's window) when you're using Windows as a limited user (which you should be doing if you're on the web). In a similar fashion you'll see plenty of bright red warning messages if IE 8 detects that you're trying to download a file that has been marked as dangerous.
On the positive side of things, when you go to your banking site or any other site that asks for your username and password (e.g. Live Hotmail), the address bar has a bright green background. At the right-hand end there's a padlock icon which you can click to view the digital security certificate for the particular site so you can check the site's validity.
Tabbed browsing
All modern browsers now use tabs in which different web pages can be opened. So when you open the ABC news page which contains links to lots of different stories you can right-click a link to a story, choose Open in a new tab from the menu and it opens in its own tab so its ready for you to read. Keep choosing stories you're interested in and open each in its own tab. This technique is much more efficient than clicking a link, browsing the story then clicking the back button to return to the main page - oops, where was I up to? Hint another way to open a new tab: hover over the link, hold down the Ctrl key and left-click with the mouse.
Similarly when searching a topic and you're faced with hundreds of possible sites, use the right-click and open in a new tab method to load each page in its own tab. This way you keep your place on the page listing possible sites and it's easy then to click each tab to check the results of your search. Close any tab that's not relevant by clicking on the small x on the tab or click the mouse scroll wheel or use the Ctrl-W shortcut. As you open new tabs from your search page, for example, note that each new tab is coloured the same so you can easily recognise a group of pages.
Accelerators
To make it even easier to carry out various tasks so you don't have to flip back and forth between web pages, you can highlight some text (it could even be an address) on the current web page and up pops a small blue icon. Click this icon to access different accelerators - you can carry out a search, translate the text to another language, or, if you've highlighted an address, choose the Live Search Map accelerator to locate the address on Live Maps.
There are lots more accelerators available and you should be able to find ones that suit your browsing habits. Look through the list that you can reach under All Accelerators - Manage Accelerators.
Download
Go ahead and download Internet Explorer 8 from www.microsoft.com/ie8/ so you can enjoy safer, more convenient and easier web browsing.