Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 out today

the new Internet Expoloder 8 from micro$hit will explode your computer with malware 8 times faster than all the other browser combined ! isnt that amazing?

"Oh... and It doesn't work with Microsoft's Windows 7 Operating System yet. "

That would be the OS that has not yet been released? And that comes with IE8 as standard?

Damn those MS'ers for not supporting unreleased operating systems, but including the applications anyway.

Meh, it's just a release candidate. That's certainly not worth the time to try.

Nope, it's the RTM.

One would hope that it is patched for the bug in the Beta (on Win7 beta) that was recently cracked at the PWN2OWN competition.

will it support web standarts or is it another browser for m$ internet?

Yeah, I wonder how IE8 fares on web-standard tests. I hope we won't need yet again those manuals with tricks "How to make your website work with IE"

When I installed win7 beta, it came with IE8.......

"Oh... and It doesn't work with Microsoft's Windows 7 Operating System yet. "

Well, who you gonna believe.... me or my lying eyes! LOL

The IE8 RTM doesn't work with Win7, yet... and the version of IE8 that Win7 Beta came with was somewhere around Beta2... but with a few strange glitches and quirks. You'll likely have to wait for the Win7 RC1 to see the IE8 RTM on Win7.

IE8 is not a RC. It's the proper final release... (not sure that's the right way to discrible it)

I just installed it and it is very fast.
The pages load a little faster from Firefox 3.0 !!!!

Do not be biased install it and see for yourself !!! Microsoft had done a good job this time.

I'm a web developer for 1 of the largest Universities in Europe. Every day I get into work and get increasingly upset through-out the day. This down to my having to develop a web page/site and then tweak it so it'll display as intended in IE. This is despite the fact that it displays fine in Chrome, Safari, K-meleon, Opera and just about ok in firefox (who seem to have gone down hill since v3).

I had hoped IE 8 would be different, as MS had promised. Unsurprisingly, it's just as bad as IE 7.

I've just ran the Acid 3 test (http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3) on all the above browsers and got these results:

Opera v9.64: 85
Chrome (default): 78
Chrome (Incognito): 75
Safari: 74
FireFox: 71
K-meleon: 53
IE 8 (default): 12
IE 8 (Compatability mode): 13

Granted, none of the browsers are perfect but they all go a long way to try and get it right. IE just doesn't! I really do hope the rumour that MS will scrap IE is true. Otherwise, they have a shed-load of work to do to even come close to meeting BASIC standards. They may as well, just start from scratch.

I'm not a browser snob. I've been using IE for a long time now without too many complaints, but this version is terrible. I've IE8 for a while now and it is much less stable than IE7. It displays many pages badly, unless you use the compatibility mode, which often results in you being logged out of the page you were in. It crashes constantly; ironically one of the worst offending sites being a Microsoft Exchange Webmail site. It has problems selecting text in input boxes. I'm going to revert back to IE7 as soon as possible.

headline-hunting maggot, next time tell the whole truth in your articles or get another damn job! It is a damn RC1 you fool, do you even understand what that means?

Some advice... Check your facts before you abuse.

MS have posted the RTM (Release to Manufacture) version to the IE download page - this is NOT the Release Candidate, it's the final version.

I installed it I created a system restore point before it thou I usually have that switched off but not when I install stuff like this.

It installed fine once it rebooted it gave me so many dam questions I couldn't understand what it was on about. Accellorators and that crap I switched that off because I've no idea what it does. Once done FINALLY I closed it down and opened it back up to google homepage it was slower than IE7 when opening.

It shows up twice for 1 tab in Task Manager and a 2nd tab open up another iexporer.exe each have 40mb memory I understand 1 but 3 for 2 tabs????. Anyways closed down IE8 and in task manager I had to end process to terminate IE8 completely.

Went back to IE7 all is fine no worries I think I will leave IE8 until I have to upgrade. I dont need firefox I dont need any other browser I am fine with IE7. I have a Win XP Pro SP3, AMD 9550 machine with 2GB PC8500 OCZ Reaper soon to by 4GB Reaper so memory is not an issue just the dam slowness of it opening and failing to close properly.

"It doesn't work with Microsoft's Windows 7 Operating System yet"

It doesn't work on XP either. I downloaded it, installed it (requiringa reboot, of course, as all MS software seems to need), and fired it up and stared at big black areas in the areas where the menus should be.

The computer has an ATI Radeon video card, if that makes any difference.

I tried various things to try and get IE8 to fix itself, and after 10 minutes of hopelessness, uninstaled it.

It seems that, as usual, MS is releasing software that is only partly tested.

IE8 runs in standards mode by default, whereas IE7 runs in a partial standards superset of IE6 quirks mode.

This is because the web-developer community requested MS to do this.

Websites that are either written for IE7/6, or detect IE and then assume IE7 mode should be applied, will not work when IE8 is in its default standards mode.

To deal with this problem, there is a compatibility button, so you can force the browser into IE7 mode. The IE7 compatibility button is visible whenever IE8 detects a page is not compatible with standards mode.

The programmer can also request the browser to switch into IE7 mode to display a page, where they know the code is written to non-standards IE7 mode, in which case the compatibility button won’t be shown.

For all the pages I’ve tested so far, standards mode pages render correctly in the browser’s default standards mode, and whenever the compatibility button appears, to indicate non-standards code, clicking on it makes the page render correctly.

IE8 also installs with a higher default level of security to IE7, and may require some adjusting. Menus typically require that javascript is enabled for the zone you are viewing the page in, and if disabled, will result in a non-functionl section of page until you re-enable it for the site.