Ie 8

Anyone running Internet Explorer 8 yet, any thoughts on the upgade?

Seems to be both good and bad news about

SEATTLE — Can Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer Web browser reclaim chunks of market share swiped by upstart Firefox?
The arrival last week of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), just two years after Microsoft's last major browser upgrade, IE7, should help answer that question.

IE8, which can be downloaded free, has cool new features: "Web slices" let you quickly call up selected content from a Web page — such as updates from an eBay auction page — via the IE8 favorites bar; "accelerators" make it easier to cut and paste text from one page and insert it on another.

Beyond that, IE8 has restored some of Microsoft's lost bravado. Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, insists IE8 is uniformly faster at loading Web pages than Firefox 3, despite debate in tech circles about this claim.


Microsoft Corp is boasting about the performance speed of the IE8, but the new browser remains the slowest of the top five on the market.

According to JavaScript rendering tests run by Computerworld, the final version of IE8 is only slightly faster than the browser's Release Candidate 1, which Microsoft released in January.

According to the test findings (which appeared in Computerworld) Google Inc's Chrome led all browsers in the SunSpider tests, making it more than four times faster than IE8. Second was Mozilla Corp's Firefox 3.0.7, followed by Apple Inc's Safari 3.2.2 for Windows and Opera Software's Opera 9.63.

Firefox proved to be 59 per cent faster than IE8, while Safari was 47 per cent faster. Opera, the slowest non-Microsoft production browser, was still 38 per cent faster than IE8.

Walt Mossberg, the personal-technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, criticised IE 8's performance in an All Things Digital post, "Microsoft claims IE 8 is very fast, but in my tests, speed and performance were its worst attributes. Using two computers, one running Windows XP and one running Windows Vista, I timed the loading of a half-dozen popular Web sites, plus two folders containing numerous news and sports sites. I repeated the test in IE 8, and in Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome. In every case, IE 8 loaded the pages and folders more slowly than most of the other browsers, and in most cases, it came in dead last."

Incidentally, Microsoft said that its own speed tests prove Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to be faster than both Firefox and Chrome.
 
I'll give it a go.

Downloading it right now.

I've found basically no diff between Firefox and the current IE to be honest, and I prefer Firefox's interface.
 
As it is Google stores a lot of what you search for in their web page search engine, it makes me uneasy that they could also be monitoring every site you visit via their browser (Chrome). I'll be sticking to Firefox for now.
 
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