After releasing IE6 back in August of 2001 and seemingly winning the browser wars, Microsoft took a long break from making any advancement in their web browsing software. It wasn’t until late 2006 that they finally introduced the much needed upgrade IE7. But at this point, although still retaining the largest portion of the browser market, they have been playing technological catch-up to new browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and most recently Chrome, all of whom have been slowly but surely taking away from Internet Explorer’s dominance.

Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, rather than wait another 5 years, Microsoft has come out with another upgrade just over 2 years after the release of IE7. As of Thursday at noon Internet Explorer 8 was made available for download. This time rather than playing catch up Microsoft is trying to move back to the head of the pack, with improvements to tabbed browsing (if you don’t know what this is you must be one of the few still holding on to IE6 and some web developers in Norway might have something to say about this), faster rendering of web pages, better security and some interesting new features called ‘accelerators’ and ‘slices’.

Check out a review of Microsoft’s new IE8 web browser.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Technology News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.