I had pretty much abandoned Internet Explorer some time ago (after I left Microsoft, of course) in favor of my long-time favorite browser for over 12 years, and one which is simply a researcher's dream come true, Opera (yeah its free). Frustrating as it is, I do have to use IE for certain websites that are "designed to work only with IE," so I opted to download IE8 which is now out of beta. The new features are a dramatic improvement, and in fact I am warming up to it so much that I now have it open along with Opera.

Hey, I'm not saying this is replacing Opera, but I do want to highlight a couple of things recruiters/sourcers may find very useful, particularly if they "have" to keep IE open for some reason.

Search In-page

Search is the lifeblood of any knowledge worker, but particularly so with researchers. When you hit CTRL-F on your keyboard instead of the familiar Windows OS "Find in text" popup you now get a browser toolbar with a box where you type in a word and it finds occurrences of that word among the text in the page below. This is much closer to Opera and Firefox's "find" function but with some improvements. First, it tells you how many "matches" - that is to say how many times the word you seek appears in the text below. It also allows you to navigate to the next or previous occurrence of that page, find an exact match for the whole word, and even has case sensitive matching.

Integrated Search

On the top left site IE8 has a built-in search toolbar that allows you to choose from a dropdown of default search engines like Google, Live, and Yahoo, but also allows you to build your own. On mine I have:

• Ask.com
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Zuula
• YouTube
• JigSaw
• LinkedIn
• Wayback

Opera still does one better with the "Create Search" right-mouse-click option that works on any search box in any webpage, but this addition makes IE8 more search friendly, thus more useful to sourcers. As a nice touch, hover your mouse over the box and below it you get buttons to all your favorite search tools, making it very easy to switch from Google to say Live.com, or Facebook, etc.

Smooth Import

One major gripe I have when trying out new tools is that I have to start over with configuration or customization, and it's a major time suck. That's one concern I did not have with IE8! All I had to do was check a box and during the installation IE8 brought over all my favorites from IE7 as well as smoothly and accurately imported my bookmarks file from Opera. It went one step further and also kept all my RSS feeds intact, and even installed all my customizations from IE7 including search providers I had customized, making my IE8 ready for production work pretty much out of the box.

RSS

I mentioned that it imported all my RSS feeds, but I can also now do something I was not able to do before in IE7 which is to automatically authenticate password protected feeds. If you use Yammer, or other password protected corporate (or otherwise secure) feeds, this is a nice feature.

Accelerators

The Internet is all about "interactivity." Accelerators are like "browser helpers" that take the content of a web page you are browsing and select text segments to useful services with the simple right-click of your mouse. You can email, bookmark, translate or map content with the click of a mouse. I evaluated many of the currently available accelerators for use in recruiting research and this is the list of the ones I selected to install. Remember, all you have to do is select a piece of text on any web page like say a name, phrase or paragraph, then right click the selected text and choose any of these accelerators:

• Define it with Google: See a word or terminology you don't understand? Right-click it and get Google's definition.
• Map it with Live Search or Google: Going to a meeting? Highlight the address of the venue, right click and hover over the Windows Live to see a large thumbnail offering a map preview and links to more details maps, directions to or from, and a bird's-eye-view.
• Find it on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twingly Blog Search or Google News: See the name of an interesting person or company? Right-click and find them on any of these social networks.
• Search it on Ask.com, Google, Windows Live, Yahoo!, Zuula, Wikipedia or YouTube: Found some interesting intelligence on your competitor? For example like a department's internal nickname, or the codeword name for a new product? Highlight, right-click and search for it using any of the top four search engines, or go dig up more information about the topic on Wikipedia. Don't forger YouTube, a great source of insider info in the form of video interviews for blogs and online magazines that reveal names and where you frequently find info you don't get from the blog.
• Find with Wayback Machine: Find revealing information that was on a page in previous versions but has since been removed. For example, sometimes people remove their phone number or email addresses from a page and with this you can still find it in the "archive version!"
• Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Live Messenger, and/or Windows Live Spaces: Found an interesting tip? Share it with your followers on Twitter, or your Facebook Friends, IM it to someone or post it on your blog without leaving your browser session.
• Translate it with Google, Live and Babelfish: read web pages in any language!

Restore Last Session

Have you ever been in the middle of a search and had your browser crash completely? This is one of the primary reasons I abandoned IE in favor of Opera. Every time Opera starts it asks if you want to start up where you were before. On the rare time Opera crashes, I can just start up again and if I select "yes" to that question it will open up with all the tabs exactly in the state I had them before, including scrolling down to the part of the page I was reading. In fact, it would return me to any form I was filling out complete with all the information I had been typing up until the crash, so I don't lose any work. IE8's new ability to restore a previous session makes for the most compelling reasons to start using it.

Privacy

FireFox reports on all your search activity, and it doesn't even tell you it does this, making this the least private of all browsers. Opera, on the other hand, is highly private, and in fact you have absolute control about all data leaving your computer. In fact, it's a very secure browser going beyond privacy and offering options for disabling all kinds of potential "dangers" you may find in the deep web from your basic ActiveX threats to more surreptitious scripts. Google Chrome has the "Incognito" privacy feature, and now finally IE catches up with its own variation, InPrivate Browsing. With this turned on your Internet Explorer session will not store any data about your browsing adventures. This includes cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and any other data. As a bonus, your toolbars and extensions are disabled (though you can turn them on) making for a sleek, private browsing experience for any special projects where you don't want to leave tracks.

The Conclusion

Opera still beats IE8 with its auto-page-reload, mouse gestures, speech to text, text to speech, voice commands, history/bookmarks synchronization with other computers (and mobile!), but there's times when we just "have" to have Internet Explorer when no other browser works as expected on a particular site. For those times its worth loading IE8, and in fact you may find yourself using it once more often than just when you "absolutely need it."