I’ll be honest that I was not much excited about Internet Explorer 8 until it went RTM. There is only so much beta software one can take. But today when IE8 went RTM I decided to install it on my main machine. This post talks about my first experience with the browser.

Installation of IE8 is one of the best I’ve ever seen.  The thing installed itself in less than 2 minutes. Good on you Microsoft. It did ask me to restart my machine and I happily obliged. After the restart I fired up the browser and was presented with a Set Up Windows Internet Explorer 8 wizard. Here are the screenshots from that wizard. BTW: I run Windows 2008 Server on my main machine as my workstation.

Next screen asked me if I wanted IE to discover websites based on the sites I visit. Sure! Why not. The way this works is that Microsoft gathers data about the sites you browse and makes recommendations about similar sites. I usually turn such features off but just to see how it works I left it on. If it does a good job then I will leave it on forever. You can read the Internet Explorer Privacy Statement if you are concerned about what data will be collected. The Privacy Statement can be found here.

Next screen asked me if I’d like to use express settings or custom settings. I always choose custom settings so that I know what is being installed. After choosing custom settings and clicking on the Next button, the first screen allowed me to configure my search provider. I opted to keep my search provider.

After this I was asked if I wanted to download updates for search provider. What is this? I don’t understand so it’s a no.

Next screen is for accelerators. Accelerators are a new addition to Internet Explorer. Here is what help has to say about accelerators.

You can use Accelerators with text that you select on a webpage to perform such tasks as opening a street address in a mapping website or looking up the dictionary definition for a word. You can also choose the web services or websites that Accelerators use to handle different types of tasks. Internet Explorer 8 comes with a selection of Accelerators included by default, but you can add or remove them as you like.

I decided to keep my current accelerators.

Then I was asked about SmartScreen Filters. Turning this on means that some websites addresses will be sent to Microsoft where they can be checked for being malicious, fraudulent types. Because I do not go to any such sites, I decided to turn this off.

Next screen was about Compatibility Settings. Turning this on will make sites designed for older browsers look better (whatever that means) in IE8. Because I want to see how old sites look in IE8 in their raw form, I decided to turn this off. Of course this can be turned on at anytime.

And that’s about it. I clicked on the Finish button and I was all ready to browse the World Wide Web. The first site I opened in IE8 is One .Net Way. Just typing one in the address bar presented me with a history of sites I have visited with the word “one” in them.

Right away I was impressed by the performance. Drop down on address bar with my history items was very fast.

Overall experience of upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 has been good. I can’t say that I am disappointed with anything so far. I am sure that Microsoft has put in tremendous effort to get it right and more so because of the competition in the browser market. My overall gut feel about IE 8 is good. I’ll be using it a bit more and I will post anything I find interesting.

Finally here is a screenshot of One .Net Way in Internet Explorer 8.