The IT Nerd

My wife asked me to take a look at her computer last night as she was getting what she termed a “weird” update message. When I looked at it, I was kind of surprised to see that her copy of Windows XP was asking her to download Internet Explorer 8 as it was a “critical” update.

Since when is a web browser critical to the smooth operation of a computer?

I had been ignoring IE8 for some time, but I figured that now would be a good time to look at it. So I hopped onto my MacBook Pro and fired up Parallels Desktop to see if I could replicate the behaviour inside one of my Windows XP virtual machine’s. It didn’t take long before the system tray notification of a “critical” update appeared with Internet Explorer 8 being the update. So I downloaded it and installed it and rebooted the machine. On the reboot, it whipped me through a setup wizard. This is where you need to pay attention. During this setup wizard you will hit this screen:

Do yourself a favor and select “Choose Custom Settings” and walk through the settings in question. If you go with the express settings it may override things like your default search provider or your default web browser.

So what do I think about it? IE 8 looks better than its predecessors and “feels” somewhat faster. But I will have to say Google Chrome still loads faster and seems to load pages a bit faster than IE8 or Firefox 3.0.10. I’ll have to play with it some more to get some more meaningful impressions.

But I am not installing it on my wife’s computer as it is NOT a critical update.

This entry was posted on May 1, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft. 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.