installation
installing ie8 was like installing most software’s from miccrosoft, long, since my internet connection is pretty fast downloading was quick but, since my computer is pretty slow, installing it took about an hour and a half. sadly you have to restart the computer and if you have beta 1 installed you have to restart twice. and once that's done it still has to load the settings from ie7.
over all
at first look ie8 looks about exactly like ie7 except for the tabs being slicker and thinner and some new buttons. also all the ie7 add-ons works great with ie8 (well the ones i had). but there's an x next to my yahoo toolbar witch i think is kind of pointless. they also added a security button that gives you access to inprivate browsing and the phishing filter and deleting browsing history. also you can only access the add to favorites button when your favorites bar is displayed or by clicking the favorites button.
performance
performance wise i think it has improve tremendacely. while i cant say it's faster that firefox but it is a lot faster than ie7. tabs come out quicker but i think it could be faster if the page:about thing did not have so much info in it but that's cool. also in ie7 when reading rss feeds it use to be pretty slow but now it's better. also with the separation off tabs, i dont know how to explain what that means, but i do see that working in between tabs does not effect the other open tabs. standard mode messes up sites that edit themselves to catter to ie users but those sites can be fixed with the emulate button(but not lot of website hade this issue and if they did it was minimal)
new features
the most well know new features are the web slices and accelerators. the web slices are ok but there's not a lot of them i only have two installed one from msn and live weather they're both useful and i hope more people start doing this because it's a great feature. accelerators are service that accelerate you browsing experience; while this is true they do accelerate you browsing, but i think the name is seriously a bad one, when i first heard about it i thought it was there to improve the browser's speed. the accelerators are unique to ie8 and i think it's a great idea(for example: you can defy a word using encarta, or find an address using live or google maps), one thing is that some are more convenient than others; if you use live maps you can see the map in the same tab but google map opens a new tab. other things include inprivate browsing(which i wont be using often), a smart browser bar(which is more organized than firefox's awsomebar but function in the same way), search results directly from the search bar(like firefox but unlike firefox it displays images also), and more that i did not use or used much.
in general i think internet explorer 8 is going to be a great browser while i don’t think every firefox users are going to switch back but i know that current users have a lot of reasons to stick. i think i'm going to enjoy internet explore eight; all they need to do now is to add some more unique features and maybe spell check that would be wonderful.
