At last, my one week of testing Internet Explorer 8 comes to an end. It’s feeling great to ditch IE in this moment, but being back to Firefox is not so great. I can't just put my experience with IE8 in a single word or two and it can't be even assigned with some tags like #GREAT or #FAIL. IE8 is a mixed bag of bloat, with most ugly and uninteresting of them all.
IE8 does most of the regular web surfing jobs normally but when the usage time extends beyond 15 minute, serious users start feeling riding on a malfunctioning snail. Even usual sites like Twitter and Facebook are not handled well with this browser. Ridiculously, writing something in Twitter update box increases the CPU usage to 100%. In Facebook, page elements are often out of definite order and idiotically in the page. Running in ‘Compatibility Mode’ did not help too much either, only fixing some issues with Facebook. And strangely enough, when I got more than just 3 tabs opened, creating just another tab takes almost 2 seconds while the lag should not be more than just a few milliseconds. Following web standards never was IE’s forte and this time too it does not even start acid3 test. On the other hand while MS is spending too much time on beautification of Windows 7, IE is getting uglier with each increasing version. Such big tabs in such a small place, it’s not even usable with 5 or more tabs are opened while someone is working on 1024*768 resolution. With all those fallacies at its disposal, I did not find a single good feature in IE that surpasses any of Firefox, Chrome, Safari or even Opera.
