Internet Explorer 8 - Now with less Beta!

[ninstar]

Web developers and internet browsers, Microsoft have now released the stable build of Internet Explorer 8! Microsoft's in-house web browser has proved its W3C standards complience by passing The Second Acid Test. Though it still fails horribly in The Third Acid Test, (more than any other browser I hear), it scores 8 points more than its preducessor.
Internet Explorer is now more secure than ever, and the existing vulnerabilities are comparable to Safari and Opera, and significantly less than Firefox (albeit, ActiveX still has major vulnerabilities)
Tabs are now isolated, so any crashes will only affect one page. Internet Explorer 8 also offers the ability to restore your previous browsing sessions and restore any closed tabs. Tabs are colour-grouped to distinguish which tabs were opened from the same pages.
InPrivate Browsing allows you to browse the internet while erasing any cookies, history, forms and files downloaded, used or sent during the session.
If you have Internet Explorer installed on your computer (excluding Mac Internet Explorer users and those who have Windows 7 and have chosen to uninstall Internet Explorer), feel free to update! Enjoy browsing the web with a better experience!

That's the crux of Internet Explorer 8, but what does everyone else think of it? I use IE as my primary browser (Chrome's my second preference), and I'm very happy with the upgrades. Standards complience gives me the change to code using good HTML and know that there'll be minimal hiccups with other browsers, and I love the tab functionality. Even though IE doesn't crash much on me (ah, the beauty of having a defragmented computer), it's great to know that if a crash occurs, you can easily recover your pages. It's smooth, and I like that. Your impressions?

Oh, and browser wars are not appreciated here. This topic isn't a place for arguing other browsers' downfalls, nor is it a place where users of other browsers to come and point out Internet Explorer's donwfalls. (We've heard it all before and aren't interested. I've had numerous bad experiences with Firefox users, so this goes out to you especially.) Keep that to the Crossfire forum.

[alexandgruntz]

I'm sticking with Firefox, but I won't say why as that belongs in Crossfire.

I've installed IE8 on both my netbook and desktop, one running XP and the other Vista, but only because I like having the latest software on each.

[farscapeone]

Don't you just hate being a web designer? You always have to install all kinds of sh**t on your system.

[freenetter]

I absolutely love it. It's really fast, looks a fair bit nicer than IE7, and the web slices and accelerators are pretty cool - a neat little edge over the competition (Although I doubt it'll last, someone's bound to make a Firefox extension like it.)

I think IE8 should have had a download manager and a password manager - the latter being the most missed option, I think. In Firefox, you can see every username and password you have for every site you have selected 'Remember password' for - no such thing in IE8, as I am aware. Also what really sucks, is that in IE8, you can't actually delete one site's username and password auto-complete - you have to delete ALL the usernames and passwords for every single site you ever went to, whereas in Firefox, you can scroll down the list until you find your username and password you made Firefox remember for X10hosting, and just delete it.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on the any of above points - I will be pleasantly surprised to find out if I am.

[Zdroyd]

I will never use IE again, even if it turns out to be better than Firefox.

[akkudreamz]

Making fun of an IE user is like making fun of a kid sitting in a wheel chair

Although web developers are cursed with testing their work on all the browsers :|

[Armacci Design]

While I've been converted over to the firefox bandwagon (yay addons), as a web designer I would be utterly stupid to not test my sites on the new version of IE. That goes for the rest of you webdevs too - yes, you might have a tattoo of the firefox icon somewhere I can't mention, but the fact remains that a huge majority of users have nothing but IE (I think it's in the high 90%s now).

We'll just have to suck it up. :P

[Livewire]

While I've been converted over to the firefox bandwagon (yay addons), as a web designer I would be utterly stupid to not test my sites on the new version of IE. That goes for the rest of you webdevs too - yes, you might have a tattoo of the firefox icon somewhere I can't mention, but the fact remains that a huge majority of users have nothing but IE (I think it's in the high 90%s now).

We'll just have to suck it up. :P

Quoted for Truth.


Although I'm screaming in agony that I have to voluntarily install it.

[farscapeone]

While I've been converted over to the firefox bandwagon (yay addons), as a web designer I would be utterly stupid to not test my sites on the new version of IE. That goes for the rest of you webdevs too - yes, you might have a tattoo of the firefox icon somewhere I can't mention, but the fact remains that a huge majority of users have nothing but IE (I think it's in the high 90%s now).

We'll just have to suck it up. :P

Huge majority of users have IE6 and IE7 because they get them preinstaled on their OS (XP and Vista). I don't think that IE8 will get that kind of popularity until Windows 7 is out.

Thank god you're not right about those 90%. IE has about 70% (and falling ) now.