Internet Explorer 8 is probably going to be released very soon. So I thought I'd do a quick article on how to tidy the thing up a bit - I'm not happy with how the UI is configured out of the box, It's not as clean as IE7. This is what it looks like right off the bat:
The most obvious addition is the favourites bar running along the top I'm not the world's biggest fan of this thing. If you don't like the amount of space it takes up and don't mind losing quick access to web slices you can right click on an empty area of it and uncheck the favourites bar option:
On resolution constrained computers like my Dell Mini 9 I also turn off the status bar (and run it in fullscreen), I don't generally recommend people do that as they lose the ability to see what website hyperlinks point to, I'd like to see a status bar that automatically hides like Chrome in IE9.
You can also tidy up the what buttons are shown, toggle if they show text and icons or just icons you can do this by right-clicking an empty area of the tab or favourites bar and going to Customise. The options for removing buttons you don't want, for example the e-mail and help buttons looks a bit like this:
Here's what IE8 looks like after doing a few tweaks to it, much cleaner in my opinion.
