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Hold off on the Internet Explorer 8 upgrade

Gethin loves Flickr, 13 Apr 08
photo credit: Castaway in Wales

Are you really still using Internet Explorer after all these years of me promoting and talking up Firefox? If you are, Microsoft released IE 8 last week, and already people are running away from it because of compatibility and stability problems.

Like always, hold off on these types of upgrades for at least 3 months and let others be the guienea pigs for Microsoft. You will get along just fine with IE 7 and better with Firefox until Microsoft works out all the kinks in IE 8.

The article below indicates that Microsoft actually lost browser share over the weekend by almost 50%!

IE8 Users Downgrade To Explorer 7

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15 thoughts on “Hold off on the Internet Explorer 8 upgrade”

  1. Hi Rick – How am I not surprised … I won’t download IE8 until I absolutely have to to check sites. Why can’t they just make a normal browser that adheres to design standards? I like the part of the article where pages viewed in MS Publisher wouldn’t render properly in IE8. And I love the photo you included with this article.

  2. Have you tried compatibility mode in IE8? I use that when I have a problem at a website and it has worked great. I’m very happy with IE8 (as happy as I can be with a MS browser) – it fixed a few problems I had with IE6 and IE7 and I now can use it to get to websites that I haven’t been able to get to with IE in years. (I still use Firefox 98% of the time, though)

    1. Hello Dion, I did monkey with the compatibility mode, but since I’m not a web designer, I stick with Chrome and Firefox.

  3. I’ve been testing the x64 version of IE8 since RTM. I normally use Firefox but I am open-minded. I haven’t had any stability problems at all; it has never crashed even with 20 or more tabs open. Being an x64 version, I frequently must open a 32 bit window to view anything with Flash, but that’s not Microsoft’s fault. I’d recommend it to a current entrenched IE user without qualification. But if you’re already using FF3 or whatever, there’s no reason to switch.

    1. You can either roll back the computer using system restore, or go to Control Panel and Add/Remove programs and it will be listed there for you to remove as well.

    1. Agreed…seems like a nice update from IE7, but I’m still a Chrome and Firefox guy. Chrome for speed and simplicity, and Firefox for its extensibility. Thanks for the comment and stopping by…keep coming back…and bring a friend!

  4. i love Internet Explorer 8 because it is so much stable that the previous versions of IE. IE7 sometimes freezes and causes blue screens on my PC.

  5. i am a firefox user more than an internet explorer user but it seems that Internet explorer 8 is very stable and it its loading time for webpages is faster too.

    1. 8 is indeed a step up for IE and is coming across as an automatic update for most folks. It still tries to do its own thing when rendering many web pages and doesn’t offer the speed or flexibility, in my opinion, of a Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

  6. Internet Explorer 8 have been my most used browser this year, it is definitely stable and fast loading too. –

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