Windows® 7 Tweaks: A Comprehensive Guide on Customizing, Increasing Performance, and Securing Microsoft® Windows 7

Chapter 9. Personalizing Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of Internet Explorer that has something for everyone. Improving the rendering engine was a primary goal in this release to help web developers make their pages render properly. The new "standards compliant" mode is on by default and is the result of a rewrite of the rendering engine that powers Internet Explorer. This is welcome news to the web developer community but IE8 also has something for ordinary consumers. Performance is another area that Microsoft dedicated a lot of resources to improve. JavaScript performance is becoming more important every day in the Web 2.0 world. Just about any interactive web site is JavaScript intensive and requires a good JavaScript engine. IE6 was just horrible at processing JavaScript quickly; IE7 was better, and IE8 is significantly better.

Aside from the performance improvements that benefit everyone, Microsoft also tweaked the interface, improved tabs and security, and introduced some new features called Accelerators and Page slices. In this chapter I show you how to customize these new features and many more so you can get the most out of IE8.

Customizing Search

First introduced in Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft improved the Search box in IE8 to provide a better search experience. This allows you to search almost any web site easily. I show you how you can customize the Search box to work with your favorite sites to search (instead of using what Microsoft wants ...