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Internet Explorer 8 has been released and Microsoft are pushing it hard. If you visit the Microsoft web site you’ll find a good number of attempts to get you to upgrade; but should you upgrade now or not?
Unless you’re using IE6 (in which case you should update to IE7 now to benefit from much tighter security) then I would definitely recommend you hold off for a month or two. Why?
- Web browser security should be a primary consideration when choosing a browser (see my item on Chrome security). Like versions before it IE8 relies heavily on Active-X which has proven highly vulnerable to attack in the past.
- IE8 has been tested by only a very small proportion of users world wide. Now that it’s being released it’s really going to get a hammering and already there’s some reports coming in of odd behaviour when loading pages on some Vista systems and, strangely, IE8 reverting back to IE7 after hot fixes have been applied.
- Microsoft have made claims that IE8 is the fastest browser around, and it’s certainly a faster than previous versions. However Computerworld have reported that it’s still the slowest browser.
- Web site compatibility is still an issue. Microsoft have made efforts to make IE8 more standards compatible; but there’s a side effect to this. Many sites have been set up to specifically compensate for Internet Explorer’s deviation from standard practice. Now it no longer makes those deviations these sites won’t display as they used to do in IE7. Microsoft have kindly provided a ‘compatibility button’ on the browser so you can make it behave like IE7 for a particular site; but who wants the hassle of sites that don’t display properly and require a user to take action to remedy the situation.
If you’re looking for a browser upgrade then I’d recommend Firefox or Google Chrome; both are faster and more secure than Internet Explorer 8. If you must stick with IE then I’d definitely wait at least a month for the first round of security updates to become available before you upgrade.
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