Microsoft Officially Releases IE8
Today Microsoft has released the final version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Designed to counter its declining web usage share with the entire IE brand, IE8 doesn't bring any new features (since it was in beta), but it does put on some speed. The underlying code base which glues everything together has been optimized and tweaked for performance. Can all these upgrades help make IE8 your new browser of choice?
Recently, many have doubted Microsoft's ability to battle Mozilla, Apple and Opera in terms of features. Today's release of IE 8 has more privacy and security features, but it also manages to put it in the battlefield with other browser players. For example, IE8 has a really solid tabbed browser feature, and its search bar is now on par with Firefox and Google's Chrome. It's address bar now doubles as a search box, but it does emit a certain amount of intelligence that Firefox still needs an extra keystroke to emit. However, in terms of speed, IE8 is still lagging seriously behind Apple's Safari, Firefox and Chrome. As more internet applications become more complex, this may make many consider using another browser.
IE has released web slices and accelerators (which work like web widgets in that they automatically grab snippets of information from pages), unfortunately, they both use Microsoft propriety technology - meaning they work only with IE8 optimized sites. This reliance on proprietary technologies will certainly hamper their acceptance among web developers that simply won't be able to spend the money necessary to simply tailor to Microsoft. Chances are that this won't change in the future, meaning these two features probably won't go very far.
With IE8, there are more options for administrators to easily phase out of IE6 and move to upgrade. New Group Policy settings lets your admin configure IE8 to run in IE7 standards mode, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough to convince admins to phase out IE6 from the corporate world in favor of a new browser.
Read more about all of IE8's new features at Microsoft's IE8 homepage.
*All articles referenced and credited to another site are for informational purposes only. TSG takes no responsibility for the legitimacy of the statements made on other web sites. If you ever have a question on any information found here, please let us know.
