Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8), the long-awaited successor to IE 7, is about to turn a lot of heads, as Microsoft nears completion of a browser upgrade that does significantly more than tack on enhancements to existing features.
The challengers keep coming, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer still holds the lion's share of the Web browser market. Most estimates put Internet Explorer's market share at around 72 per cent, which means that when a new version of the browser is released, a lot of people will likely be upgrading. Here's what's in store.
Perhaps the biggest news about IE 8 is what Microsoft has done for performance of the browser. In short, the browser is faster in almost every respect. It loads faster, switches pages faster, and renders complex graphics and videos faster than in previous versions.
No doubt Microsoft is responding, as it has in Windows 7, to users' insistence that performance is consideration number one when it comes to software. But IE now also has considerable competition from Google's recently released Chrome browser, which loads faster than any other browser on the market.
Load times, while they may seem trivial on the surface, are actually very important to most of us, since the Web browser is typically called up many times during the day, and for many different reasons. Waiting for the browser to load, therefore, becomes a serious productivity issue.
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