IE8�€”worth it?

I have not used Internet Explorer (IE) regularly since I first checked out a beta build of Mozilla Firefox in 2004. Since then, I’ve moved to Google Chrome, but I decided to give IE8 a whirl. And guess what? It has improved enormously and is, by far, the best iteration of the browser to date. The coloured “associated” tabs feature is a godsend for people who open 15 tabs in no time and the “web slices” feature is pretty interesting as well.

According to benchmark tests conducted by Microsoft, IE8 keeps pace with Chrome and beats Firefox. In real life, though, unless you have a pathetically slow connection, load-time comparisons make little difference.

And if you have a slow, old computer, then neither of these three browsers would work well. Opera outperforms them all. So, unless sparing 20 megabytes is really an issue for you (if it is, buy a hard-disk, they’re not that expensive) give this a whirl, and if you are using older versions of IE, switch to IE8 fast for security reasons above all else.