Internet Explorer 8, just as rival browsers, including Google Chrome and the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, comes with an evolved address bar. The IE8 Smart Address bar is no longer limited to allowing end users to enter a URL in order to navigate to a certain website. Instead, the space has become an invaluable tool, by hooking into various areas across the browser, including browsing history, favorites, feeds, and forms. As the successor of IE7 progressed along to RTW (release to web) from Beta 1 to Beta 2 and to Release Candidate, Microsoft tweaked the speed of the Smart Address Bar, and revealed that it managed to deliver a performance boost of almost 100% in certain situations.

“Although the Smart Address bar performance during the beta periods was acceptable for the most part, in some cases the address bar performed a bit slowly, and sometimes incredibly slowly. We made several changes under the hood with the net result of improved performance by 50% on average, and over 98% in some scenarios,” revealed Seth McLaughlin, user experience program manager, Internet Explorer.

An integral part of the performance enhancements is related to the way the Smart Address bar accesses and delivers information to end users. For a single character entered into the address bar, users will see previously typed URLs. When additional characters are added, the browser starts returning not only addresses but also local data such as history and favorites.

“This is due to the fact that typed addresses are stored in the registry while history, favorites, and feeds are indexed using Windows Search. Accessing data from a small, fixed list of registry keys is quicker than querying a database such as Windows Search. Instead of waiting for all the returned results, results are now shown dynamically as they become available. In most cases you will still see all results populate in the address bar simultaneously. Depending on your machine configuration and the size of your Windows Search index, there may be times where you see typed addresses first follow by a slight pause and then items from history and favorites,” McLaughlin added.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).