Trying Out the New IE8
by apheus on Mar.20, 2009, under Internet
Well, I have admit that I have never been a fan of Internet Explorer – quite honestly it has been quite a pain in rear for web designers such as myself. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new Internet Explorer 8 (or IE8) may actually be standards-compliant. I want to be open-minded and accept this latest version of Microsoft’s browser with open arms. Against my better judgement, I downloaded and installed IE8 on my primary designing computer (the rest will stick with IE6 or IE7 for now).
After trying it out on a few websites I must say that I’m actually impressed with IE8 – at least so far. It doesn’t look like I’ll have to make any major changes to any of the sites I’ve designed, which is a good thing. I visited several websites to test out it’s functionality – looking for errors and odd behaviors. It did crash when I visited the Kodak.com website, but the program recovered itself and took me back to the webpage where the error occurred almost instantenously. It’s too bad IE8 crashed the first time I used it, but at least I got to see how easily it recovered from a crash. I’ll chalk that one up as a learning experience – seeing a new feature in action is getting excited about it goes with the territory of a computer nerd (of which I am one).
Another thing I noticed was how fast the webpages loaded when I was browsing. It’s much faster than my previous version of Internet Explorer. I hate to say it, but I think it’s actually faster than Firefox. Again, I was impressed. I have a pretty fast broadband internet connection and a very robust computer system, so noticing a performance increase is hard to detect with the naked eye. However, in this case the performance increase was very apparent. Good job, Microsoft!
I’m hoping that IE8 is only the first of more good things to come from Microsoft. I’m going to keep using IE8 on my main computer and will eventually upgrade my other systems, too. I’m a fan of upgrading when the upgrade is actually beneficial. If you want to give IE8 a try, go ahead and download it.
