IE8 - a quick review

For one reason or another I've decided to take a quick look at IE8. This isn't a technical or in-depth review - it's just a quick test drive from an end user point of view.

I must admit, I spent so much time and effort as an early adopter in the late 90's that it takes a lot for me to get excited about with regard to software or hardware so it's not surprise to find that I'm not remotely excited by IE. IE7 did it's very best to kill my computer and anything associated with it so I installed IE8 with trepedation and genuine fear.

My PC took longer than usual to boot up once I'd installed it but eventually it came up without issue.

I hadn't read about what the extra features were but I wasn't expecting it to not render pages correctly!

www.bbc.co.uk/football just doesn't load properly and bizarrely, despite generally being quite slow at first, IE8 seemed to speed up significantly. Amazon, Apple, etc all worked fine so it looks like it's a fault on the BBC website.

Overall I quite liked the speed of it and it is quite clean and clear in terms of the UI and overall look/feel. Once I'd used it my overall feeling was "why?". It brings nothing significant to the party and I really don't see the point of it.

As far as I can tell, IE8 is more about "Interoperability and compatibility" but there's absolutely no inovation in terms of features, benefits or cool stuff for the end user.

Webslices and activities didn't really ring my bell so for me, IE8 is just another browser to support and therefore a pain in the backside!