Eight Reasons to Fall in Love with Internet Explorer 8
As announced at the MIX09 conference today, we just shipped the final version of Internet Explorer 8. If you haven’t yet given it a try, here are eight reasons that might persuade you to check it out:
- You want a web that moves as fast as you do: Highlight an address, click the blue "Accelerator" button (), and see all the things you can do instantly – like mapping, searching, and translating. Check out accelerators from Digg, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, and others.
- You want to know if it's raining outside: Visit live.com, search for “Seattle Weather” (or any major city), hover over the search result, and click the green "Web Slice" button () to add a weather Web Slice to your Favorites Bar. As of this morning there are over 1,200 Web Slices, Accelerators, and add-ons available worldwide in the IE8 add-on gallery.
- You like everyone to get along: And that includes wanting the web sites you visit to work well with your browser. IE8 is the only browser to include multiple rendering engines to address backwards compatibility— hit a site that doesn't seem right, hit the Compatibility View button, and you're on your way.
- You're a visual learner: See pictures of what you’re looking for as you type in the Instant Search box – rich search results in action! Don’t forget to install some extra search providers, such as those from NY Times, Amazon, Wikipedia, OneRiot and ESPN.
- You want to find it again, fast: To quickly find sites you’ve visited before, simply use the new Smart Address Bar which searches your history, favorites, and feeds.
- You like your privacy: Enjoy more control over your personal information and privacy on the Web with InPrivate. Keep your work and personal lives separate and protect yourself from unwanted cookies.
- You want an edge against the bad guys (aka security): Internet Explorer 8 offers unparalleled protection against malware – it's ten times safer than Internet Explorer 7, four times safer than Chrome, nearly three times safer than Safari, and twice as safe as Firefox according to an independent study.
- You hate interruptions: If one tab crashes, you can re-launch it without affecting your browsing experience – your other tabs keep right on working.
IE8 isn’t just a good browser, it’s much faster than the Internet Explorer of old. Check out this video to see performance tests of real-world sites with leading browsers. Great web performance is about more than the speed of the scripting engine – in the real-world, it’s an end-to-end test of all the browser components.
As far as I’m concerned, the only legitimate excuse for not upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 is if you’re currently already living on the leading edge with Windows 7 Beta. A pre-release version of Internet Explorer 8 is already built into the beta of Windows 7. When we ship the release candidate of Windows 7 later this year, we’ll include the final IE8 release.