Internet Explorer 8 released today: Extensive hands-on report

By Nate Lanxon on 19 March 2009, 4:00am

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Performance and security

Microsoft has made improvements to IE's support for Web standards. Using the industry-favoured Acid3 test for analysing its compliance with many of these standards, however, IE 8 scored 20 out of 100 marks -- an improvement, yes, but a far cry from what developers hope modern browsers will strive to achieve.

It's safe for many people to ignore these figures though, as for day-to-day tasks, the vast majority of users will find it to be a perfectly responsive browser. Unless you're using a netbook.

IE 8 splits individual tabs into their own processes, a la Chrome. This means a Web page can crash without taking the browser and all other open tabs with it, and it works really well. But it also gobbles system resources. At one point we saw IE's processes collectively using almost 500MB of RAM. On a netbook with limited memory, this could be an issue -- an issue perhaps best solved by installing Opera instead.

New security features have made IE 8 far more secure, and shove a big fat cake of reassurance into the paranoid mouths of Mr and Mrs Scared O'Computers.

InPrivate browsing lets you browse sensitive sites without usernames, passwords, browsing history and cookies being saved by the browser. It's also now possible to stop private data being sent discretely to sites that collect such information -- such as display ad-serving services -- by using InPrivate Filtering. You can just block a Web site from seeing your data by adding its domain to a list within IE 8's settings.

A threat known as cross-site scripting, which can be used by hackers to steal private data even if the Web page looks completely legitimate, is looked out for in real-time in IE 8, and is offered a swift and painful axe to the face before your private data is passed on.