Microsoft IE8: An Essential Upgrade

The IE 8 SmartFilter is a service (which users can choose to turn off) that checks out sites before users surf to them. If a site is identified as one known to be a phishing site or to contain malware, IE 8 will display a warning page to the user before he or she travels there.

IE 8 also now puts the core domain name of a site being viewed in bold. This makes it easier to detect if a site is using a URL similar to, but different than, the one that the user expects to be surfing to.

Along with these obvious security features, IE 8 includes several under-the-covers features designed to stop scripting attacks, ActiveX exploits and rogue data execution. While these measures should improve security, users shouldn’t expect the browser to be fully secure. As is the case with all new browsers, it is inevitable that there will be security problems with this new version of IE.

In IE 8, Microsoft has also made some stability improvements. One of the nicest of these is tab isolation, which brings down just a single tab when an unstable site is surfed to, rather than bringing down the entire browser. This feature worked well in tests, although I was a little frustrated that it kept trying to reload the offending site in the tab, essentially restarting the tab crash sequence until I hit the stop button.

Standards: good news and bad news.

IE 8 is easily the most standards-compliant Microsoft browser since IE 5, but it’s the least standards-compliant of the newest generation of Web browsers. IE 8 received the lowest score of any of the newest browsers on the Acid3 standards test from the Web Standards Project.

Because of the potential incompatibilities between IE 8 and sites written to work with older versions of IE, the new Microsoft browser includes a compatibility view that can be enabled to view sites that don’t work well in IE 8. In my tests of the late-beta, release-candidate and gold versions of IE 8, I had to use this view once a week on average. I’ve definitely run into more sites that have problems with IE 8 than I’ve run into with any other new browser. Luckily, the compatibility view fixed the problems with these sites.

What about speed?

In general, IE 8 has proven to be stable in frequent usage and hasn’t appeared to be a resource hog.

As with any vendor offering a new browser, Microsoft claims IE 8 is the fastest browser available. Since I’ve given my opinion on these browser speed wars elsewhere, I’ll just say that IE 8 appeared to be plenty fast for normal Web usage in my tests.

As one would expect from a new Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer 8 is currently available only for Windows XP and Vista. Those wanting to try out the new Microsoft browser can download it here.