It doesn’t crash my personal. It doesn’t render the Web unusable. But it certainly doesn’t work superior than Firefox, Opera or Safari.
The private browsing feature is nice, which is why Apple brought it to Safari years ago.
As for the much touted accelerators, they, too, underwhelm.
Accelerators allow you to highlight a chunk of text, mouse over a little box that appears nearby and select to feed that text into a search engine, a map program, a translator or a social networking site.
A new tab pops up with your search results, map, Facebook page or whatever else you choose.
Nice idea, but it’s not much faster than doing the same things manually. It takes time to highlight the text yourself, wait for the menu to pop up, choose among the options and wait for the new tab to load.
IE 8 fares reasonably well at basic browsing.
It renders complex pages quickly, though not so fast, in my trials, as Opera or Firefox.
Worse, IE 8 makes rendering mistakes on some pretty important pages. Sometimes it won’t render Google Reader at all. (When a site won’t pop up on IE 8, you can view it normally by going to the Tools menu and selecting Compatibility Mode, but that’s pretty tiresome.)
Perhaps Microsoft is making a jab at its arch-rival?
Other tiny problems abound, which is to be expected because this is beta software. Scrolling produces jerky motion. The program claims add-ons are disabled when they’re working just fine. Nothing large, but still annoying.
That said, it’s certainly much faster than IE 7 and (to my eye) it renders better-looking pages. I still prefer the competition, but folks who like IE can download the new program here and decide for themselves.
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