Having now upgraded and used IE 8.0 for over a month now, I thought it would be good to share my experiences so far. When your computer and the internet become an integral part of your daily routine, upgrading to a new version of software is a tricky decision. A month ago, I thought I'd give IE 8.0 a whirl, and here are the reasons why I thought It would be good to upgrade: Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 – Should you upgrade?. So has it worked out?

Let’s start with the good. Pretty much all of the websites I frequent work great on IE 8.0, even without even using the compatibility mode. This was not the case when upgrading from IE 6.0 to IE 7.0 when a larger number of websites worked less reliably in IE 7.0, at least early on.

The second feature that has worked out great is the domain highlighting. To recap, Domain Highlighting is a simple solution to detecting phishing by highlighting the most important part of the web address (URL) making it easier to tell if the link you got in your email to provide your account details, for example, is actually from your bank website or from another site pretending to be your bank.  During a recent email spam outbreak at work (read here for more details: More real examples of virus attacks and phishing attempts) this feature stood me in good stead.

While I usually avoid clicking on mails from unknown senders, there were a couple of links I clicked on, and the domain highlighting feature alerted me to a possible phishing attempt. This is such a simple feature; it is indeed amazing how useful it can be!

The IE 8 browser does seem more stable as advertised by Microsoft. I also like the feature where it restores sessions or websites I was previously browsing, should the browser window hang or crash. This has happened a couple of times and it beats having to figure out the URLs to the websites I was browsing, especially ones that I searched off Google and don’t have stored as a favorite yet.

Over to the bad, the only thing I found that did not work was a feature in my Outlook Web mail where it does not allow me to highlight an email as important. This feature did not even work in Compatibility mode, so that is something to be aware of if you use a lot of web based applications that do not yet officially support IE 8.0.

Finally the ugly, I hate the way IE 8.0 manages sessions. When you login to a website such as Yahoo for your email a session is created. With IE 7.0 if you wanted to login to another account in the same website, you could open another IE browser window and login to another account of Yahoo. IE 8.0 maintains sessions across browser windows and therefore if you open the website in another browser window it logs you into the same account! I have ended up sending emails from the wrong account because of this. However, IE 8.0 does offer you a "feature" (or a workaround, call it what you wish) - you can click on the File Menu and "New Session" to solve this problem, but the embarrassment of sending an email from the wrong ID will still stay!

Overall, I am pretty happy with IE 8.0 and would continue to recommend upgrading to it, if you already haven’t done so.