As Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1, analysts looked over the new features of the web browser. As the “RC1” designation means that the final release is about to be rolled out and also means that both versions will be very similar.

Add-ons, also known as extensions and plug-ins, have always represented an important feature of the overall browsing experience. Mozilla Firefox is the best illustration of this fact, as the huge developer community means that every user can customize its Firefox installation the way he wants to.

Still, developers of Internet Explorer have been focusing more on other classes of extensions that are usually context-sensitive and that do not interfere with the browsing session. As an example, Web Slices, first introduced with IE 8 Beta 2, is a neat feature that provides the user with updated “chunks” of websites.

A common use of this extension is to see the evolution of a bid on eBay at a glance, or check out the weather, without actually browsing to that specific website. Even though there are few websites that support the Web Slice feature, Microsoft promised that the service would become more popular at the time of the final release.

Other interesting extensions of Internet Explorer are the Accelerators, which are particularly useful when looking for specific information on a website. The Google-search accelerator lets users select text from a website and send it to Google’s websearch with a click of a button.

Visual Search is a completely new feature, a first in the Internet Explorer series and in the web browser market. Visual Search is integrated in the search bar, on the top right side of the screen. When a user is using the search bar through Google or Wikipedia, the Visual Search feature shows previews from the search results page, or even previews of Wikipedia articles.

Overall, it seems that Internet Explorer 8 will do the trick for Microsoft and will increase its market share, as previous versions have become less popular, as now there are more Firefox fans than ever before.