Download Internet Explorer 8 RTM Today!
It’s a great thing when I can truly throw my full support behind a Microsoft release. Well, I’ve been using IE8 for a number of months now, and I find the product to be solid, secure, and a worthwhile upgrade. One of my favorite changes is that each tab runs under its own process – This feature saved me several times on beta builds while adding MySpace friends to build my Mob Wars Family. :) Frequently, I’d get 20+ tabs open to different MySpace pages and some of these pages had, I’m not kidding, 20 or more Flash instances running at the same time. This overloaded the IE8 Beta (it seems the issue has since been addressed as I haven’t come across this problem in recent builds), and IE would stop unexpectedly, but I’d only lose that tab, and if I happened to lose more than just that one tab, IE8’s new autorecover feature would automatically ask me if I wanted to reopen the pages that had closed unexpectedly. No lost data, no lost pages, problem solved.
Other features I love are the XSS filter (I’ve haven’t seen it activate yet in real life, but it still makes me feel more secure knowing it’s there), faster phishing filter (yes, you can actually turn it on now), colored tabs, tab management, tab grouping, the ability to manage all my add-ons in one place (it makes it so much easier to find and turn off those nagging misbehaving add-ons), and of course in-private browsing (yeah, I’ve used it and it rocks the house when you’re trying to keep your wife from finding out about that anniversary gift you searched for from your shared PC).
Anyway, if you too want to find your favorite features in the new IE8, you can get it free from the official IE8 web site.
And, if it turns out you don’t like it as much as I think you will, there is one other handy new feature: Uninstall.
