This week, we’re all about Internet Explorer. IE9 will be with us in a while, but in the meantime make sure you get the best out of IE8. ZDNet’s Ed Bott published a nice overview of some of the good usability functionality, when IE8 came out: read here.

Here are a collection if tip-ettes to make your browsing more bearable, to make your surfing sublime. In fact, some of these have been around for years and applied to other versions, but weren’t popularly known.

Tip-pette #1

· You don’t need to type http://. If you type anything into the Internet Explorer address bar, it will pre-pend the “http://” bit for you if it’s not already there.

Tip-pette #2

· When you have an IE window, you can move the “focus” to the address bar by pressing ALT-D. This also selects the entire address of the current page, so you can quickly copy it to your clipboard (CTRL-C). For other shortcut keys, click here.

Tip-pette #3

· If you press CTRL-ENTER when typing an entry into the address bar, IE will automatically add the http://www. And the .com bits for you…

· If you press SHIFT-ENTER, IE will jump to the URL at the top of your most recent list …

So, putting it all together… in IE, press ALT-D, type bing, and press CTRL-ENTER, and you’ve gone to the world’s best search engine in 6 key presses.