Internet Explorer 8 Gets Released – Worth a Go?

I’m not sure how I missed this, but last Wednesday, Microsoft finally released the next major version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. Made first as a beta last spring, Internet Explorer 8 touts most of what you’d expect to hear from a new browser release… better performance, better security, more features, et cetera. But does IE8 live up to all the hype – or better yet – compete with the fierce competition?

According to Nick Mokey at Digital Trends, not so much. He mentions that while IE8 is an incremental improvement over 7, it doesn’t bring enough useful features, or enough refinements, to change the fact that it’s a browser for those “people who don’t care“. After taking a quick look at the browser myself, I’m going to have to agree. In my quick tests, the performance didn’t seem that great – on an application level, not a page-loading level – and the browser is simply ugly when run under Windows XP.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there is a lot of dead space in the toolbar, and rather than importing my Firefox toolbar bookmarks, it simply left it all blank. I also find the location of the address bar a little strange, but that’s definitely a matter of opinion. IE 8 isn’t a horrible browser, but I’m definitely not impressed in my initial experiences, and I can for the most part agree with Nick’s points as well. Microsoft really needs to scrap IE as a whole and build a new browser from the ground up. It seems to be the only way we’re going to get a browser that’s truly competitive (you know, ignoring the fact that IE owns 75% of the browser market).

The premise behind Accelerators seems to be taking one step out the usual copy-and-paste routine we all play while Web browsing. Normally, for instance, you might find the address of a business, copy it, open a new tab, load Google Maps, and paste it in. With Accelerators, you can highlight it, click a blue icon beside the highlighted text, hover over “Map with Live Maps” and the map will flash open beside it in a square mini window.