Internet Explorer 8 officially released

The final build of Internet Explorer 8 has been announced by Microsoft, and is now available for various platforms including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  Users who want to grab it straight away can do so from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Home Page. Alternatively, Microsoft will push IE8 out via Windows Update first as an optional download, and then via Automatic Updates at a later date. Administrators who want to prevent users from getting IE8 from Microsoft's update channels will want to check out the IE8 blocker toolkit.

Already, even past cynics of Internet Explorer are now coming forward to say that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is better than the latest available release of Mozilla's Firefox browser. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in Computerworld blogs summed up several months of IE8 usage, "But after years of lagging behind Firefox, IE has finally caught up with Firefox's current production version."

One touted feature in IE8 is that opening a new tab from a link in another will result in these "related" tabs to have the same color.  Additionally, the performance of IE8 is significantly faster than IE7, and on par with that of Firefox 3.

On the security front, Microsoft has made improvements to further reduce the attack window via ActiveX controls, as well as prevention of ClickJacking attacks. Ironically though, a researcher managed to break into a computer via IE8 just hours after its official launch. You can read more about how the just launched IE8 was successfully hacked here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at Computerworld

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