Microsoft makes a better browser

When Firefox 3 launched a couple of months ago, the makers of the open source browser attempted a world record for voluntary downloads in a 24-hour span, and with eight million downloads, they achieved their aim.

This meant Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), king of the proverbial hill till then, faced a major challenge. It has now responded with the eighth iteration of the browser. So, is it any good? Well actually it is. For one, it is a lot lighter on the system, even though we were using a fairly hefty machine. That said, it seems the folks at Redmond have incorporated a lot of the little things that made Firefox so good. While Internet Explorer 7 also had tabbed browsing, the new browser has an “auto-suggest” feature and better integration with search engines.

Microsoft also claims that IE8 leads to a safer browsing experience, very important, given the large amount of online commercial transactions that take place today. In an interesting aside, the browser has something called “InPrivate”, which keeps your browsing history secret (it’s something you can do on any browser, but IE8 makes it very easy). Experts have wasted no time in dubbing the feature “porn mode”. But this little feature is definitely a plus for the browser.

Would we recommend it? Yes we would. IE8 is a definite improvement over any previous version of Internet Explorer. How does it stack up against Firefox3? Honours even, we’d say.