Internet Explorer 8 final released

Quite a lot of talks on the new version, anyone using it and comments?

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/0…plorer-8-final

Busy busy busy so I'm only making a drive by post

I was ready and waiting to download IE 8 until I witnessed this Hacker exploits IE8, Firefox, and Safari at CanSecWest. I think I will wait a few months for things to settle before making the switch.

Paul Thurrott is running a segmented review of IE8 that's somewhat informative:
Internet Explorer 8 Review

Ubbax
"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows." - David T. Wolf

Review I read says it has some pretty cool built in features, but across the board is slower than firefox.

I installed IE8 right away when it came out yesterday. As someone who requires only a pretty modest feature set, it didn't really make much of a difference to me. I can still surf the web, ya know?
The new feature I liked the most is the favorites bar where you can arrange your favorites horizontally below the address bar. That way you get rid of the side favorites menu, gaining more screen real estate in the process.
Otherwise I couldn't really tell much of a difference or put any of the other new features to any good use.

Still, I'm using Firefox 3.0x now (which I have always had installed in parallel). Not because IE8 sucks per se but because one very important (for me) IE add-on is not available for IE8 yet. I'm talking about IE7Pro which had ad blocking and a Flash blocker and a few other useful features. I was mostly missing the ad/Flash blocker so I'm going to be using FF3 now until they come out with IE8Pro or maybe I'll stick with FF3 now… dunno.

…but across the board is slower than firefox…

From personal experience with both and as I said as someone who's not doing much fancy stuff on the web but just regular home usage (banking, sports, gaming, hardware, news, online shopping, business sites etc.) I can not confirm that. They seem about equal in performance and I have read some other reviews where real world testing has shown that they are basically tied for speed.
However, what is true is that FF3 is a lot faster in scenarios where a lot of JavaScript is involved (which is not really that often the case in regular web usage). Seems like the JavaScript engine in FF is a lot more optimized as was also proven by specific synthetic benchmarks where the browsers had massive amounts of JS thrown at them.
But in day to day usage I think you'd be hard pressed to tell a difference unless you're one of those people who has the ability to switch to bullet time so you can slow the world down around you and get down to business with them milliseconds .

Based on my short experience, i agree IE8 is not noticeably faster than Firefox. Beside, the Adblock Plus plug-in is more effective than the default adblocker in IE8, and most of all, i really like the feature of when firefox starts, it shows the previous windows and tabs i am on. It is like bookmarks that automatically load up web pages or things you're doing last time.

Originally Posted by Remus
Based on my short experience, i agree IE8 is not noticeably faster than Firefox. Beside, the Adblock Plus plug-in is more effective than the default adblocker in IE8, and most of all, i really like the feature of when firefox starts, it shows the previous windows and tabs i am on. It is like bookmarks that automatically load up web pages or things you're doing last time.

IE doesn't have session manager?!?!

Originally Posted by Kostaz
IE doesn't have session manager?!?!

It does. You can easily reopen your last session via the click of a button in IE8. Don't know about IE7 since I had been using that IE7Pro add-on all the time which did have built-in session management including crash recovery. I'm not sure if vanilla IE7 had session management by itself but IE8 does.

i heard session manager in IE7Pro didn't work consistently. I tried the feature in IE8 and it sometime it opened another tab that already been opened (2-3 tabs on same web page). And is there anyway to automatically load up the tabs when launching the browser or everytime i need to open a new tab first and click the "Reopen last browsing session" link?

If you want speed you should try Google Chrome. It seemed to be slightly faster for me but well… no add-ons and fancy stuff. And it does eat more ram.

Since I have FF and Chrome I haven't even touched IE.