Very poor offeing from Microsoft (as usual) (Microsoft Internet Explorer 8)

Member Name: aaronphil

Product:	Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Date:	24/07/09 (47 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Works fine in XP

Disadvantages: Too many to mention

Yet again Microsoft has let us down with a rubbish new version of something that worked great. We had Vista, admittedly it's now fixed, and now we have Internet Explorer 8.

I though IE8 might be great, I tested the Beta and it seemed ok, a bit buggy and yes it ran slower than Firefox, but it looked promising. How wrong was I, as soon as it came out of Beta that is when all the problems started.
What is so wrong with it? The browser takes ages to actually open before I get any physical web pages, then there's the fact that on loading some web pages it goes into 'not responding' mode and it takes about 5 minutes to respond. There's also the compatibility issue with some website meaning you can't view them at all, it doesn't seem to like flash video and to top it off it takes a millennium to load pages. All this makes for a very rubbish computer experience.
I have to confess at this point that these problems only seem to occur inside Vista and it works perfectly in XP, I'll admit not as good as Firefox but better than IE7 so this is why it is my primary browser in XP. It does still suffer from incompatibility problems as in Vista though so there's no solution for that. IE8 does offer a 'compatibility view' button but it only seems to work on a select number of sites.

Overall then I would not recommend IE8 at all, if you use IE7 stick with it and if you want something better use Firefox or even (god forbid) Safari as they both run a hell of a lot better than IE8. Even though it works in XP I don't see any major improvements apart from the interface and Microsoft have now jumped on the 'add-ons' band-wagon that Firefox have been doing since the dawn of time.

Summary: Use Firefox or Google Chrome

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