9 Things You Should Know About Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Browser

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Non-Beta browser has been out for a few hours now and we have had the opportunity to test the beast and we have to say, we were impressed.

(1) Internet Explorer 8 requires a PC restart

That was something we were not expecting. Installing Internet Explorer 8 requires the uninstallation of IE7 first. None of Internet Explorer's main competitors (Chrome, Opera, Safari or Firefox) requires the user to restart their computers. It may not sound like a big thing until, like us, we needed to urgently restart our test machine in the middle of our installation.

(2) Like Firefox, you can install Add-ons

You can install add-ons on Internet Explorer 8. There are 484 add-ons and accelerators currently for Internet Explorer 8. They will allow you to add more features to Microsoft's latest browser for free and within seconds. In comparison though, Firefox has 2866 plugins and many of them fundamentally change the way the alternative browser works or looks.

(3) Unlike its Release Candidate, Internet Explorer manages memory better

One major difference between the final version of Internet Explorer and previous editions is that IE8 runs as multiple processes rather than a single one.

Furthermore, while the Release Candidate of IE8 seems to be suffering from memory leakage, the final version appears to be immune to it. We previously experienced cases of IE8 RC1 taking 1GB memory under Windows XP with one tab opened. The final version is humming away with 200MB and three tabs opened.