Three things I love about IE8 (as a technician)

Since I just (and I mean just) finished reformatting and installing the Windows 7 RTM on my desktop at work, I figured I'd leave things be and use Internet Explorer 8 for the rest of the day. Truth be told, it's a capable browser and works just fine for the majority of my web-based tasks.

Plus, I've gained a bit of respect in the past couple weeks from what I've been able to do on my workbench as a result of customers installing IE8. There are a few features that I really appreciate when I'm trying to fix someone's bogged down, beaten-up Windows install.

Improved speed

No, it's definitely not as fast as Chrome or Safari, but IE8 is definitely faster than previous versions. Since it's the browser I'm fighting with all day long as I undo customer "accidents," I'm glad performance has been improved.

InPrivate

Even though I'm just using IE to download certain tools or test functionality, I still don't want to leave tracks on my customer's computers. InPrivate makes it easy for me to be discreet.

Managing Add-ons

Easily one of the most helpful features. When I disable something like MyWebSearch, IE8 takes a look around for additional components that appear to be related and offers to disable them for me. It helps to quickly clean up lots of common browser annoyances I encounter.

Internet Explorer 8 might not be perfect, but I'm much, much happier to find it installed on someone's PC than, say version 6.

Tags: internet-explorer-8