Internet Explorer 8 Editor's Review

Internet Explorer 8 marks a huge leap forward for Microsoft, closing the gap between them and their competitors with a safer, more stable and customizable browser.

Internet Explorer 8 comes with a range of new features gives the user new and interesting ways to browse online. Accelerators provide in-page services with a single click, letting you highlight text and effortlessly perform a series of web actions such as searching, map creation or blogging. For those wanting to keep on top of things, Webslices allow the user to highlight areas of sites that they’d like to be updated on, for examples, auctions or news posts. Colour-coded tabs, a new and improved address bar and inPrivate help make this the best version of Internet Explorer yet.

Pros: Autocomplete address bar, colour-coded tabs, improved security and performance.

Cons: No download manager, windows-only, slow JavaScript.

Conclusion: The interface might not have changed much since older versions, but when you scratch the surface it’s obvious that Internet Explorer 8 is a big step up from Microsoft’s previous offerings. While new features such as Accelerators and Webslices are a welcome addition to the browsing experience, it’s the less obvious changes that deserve the most attention. The new address bar finally catches up to the competition with solid, reliable auto-complete functionality; InPrivate Browsing lets you surf the web without logging your activity in your browser history, while InPrivate Filtering goes a step further and keeps third-party sites from accessing your history as well. On the down side, a lack of a download manager is definitely felt and is an essential update needed for the next release.

Even though its core-performance still lags slightly behind Chrome and Firefox, this is the fastest, most secure version of Internet Explorer yet and Microsoft’s offering still outranks it’s competition in terms of security and backwards compatibility.