Hey guys Jerry here for Iceberg Creativity coming at you with a review for Microsoft Internet Explorer. But for those of you photoshop junkies, don’t worry there’s going to be tutorial online for tomorrow afternoon.
For the last month or so, I've been using Windows Vista and not always 10. So when I thought about doing a new review I knew right away that I should definitely do Internet Explorer 8 because my last review—my first official review that I was happy with here on Iceberg Creativity was Safari 4, the newest version of Safari. So I figured, what way to follow up with that with the newest version of its biggest competitor.
Anyway, at first I was loving this browser. The first day or two, it was fantastic. I had no problems with this browser at all. It was fast, well designed and I've even thought that Microsoft had done a really great job with it. But then, as I've said the first few days I loved it. Well, my experience went downhill with IE8 and a lot of problems ensued after that.
The first problem I encountered was the speed issue. That’s right it was a speed issue. Not pop up or spyware or missing plug-ins or random crashing. It was speed issue. At first I thought to myself, okay maybe it’s my internet connection because it does goes screwy sometimes. I mean its wireless it’s not perfect. So I reset my connection, I waited a few minutes and I popped Internet Explorer back up again to see if anything had improved. Nope, it wasn’t my connection. It was still slow as ever compared to Chrome.
Then I thought okay maybe there are all kinds of files slowing it down. You know browsing history and whatnot. So I cleared the browsing history, the cache, the cookie and all that junk. It’s as if I've just installed it. Well almost. And no, still no speed improvements. I can’t really explain it beyond that, it just slowly breakdown after the first few days of use. Moving beyond that aesthetics go it’s a great looking browser. I mean they’ve really developed something that looks nice, but well it doesn’t function so nice. But as I've said, it looks great. I mean it’s a gorgeous looking browser. I love to have that look in Firefox or Chrome or maybe in Safari. I mean in Internet Explorer 8 theme, I think it would be great! I don’t know if you have the same views on this but I just think the whole layout, the tabs, the buttons looks fantastic to me.
Staying on track with the user interface there are a few small tweaks here and there to it, but other than that it’s the same thing as the previous version of Internet Explorer, which is not bad. I mean it’s a nice looking browser and well it’s just a nice looking browser. They did a good job of designing it. And when I say designing I mean the user interface. In terms of the code and the underlying, under the hood kind of stuff it wasn’t designed so well.
Going back to the whole speed issue thing, I chose to compare it to Google’s new browser Chrome. And it did okay with some websites, but with a lot of them a lot of the ones I frequent it had trouble, especially with YouTube. And as for Safari 4, it struggled to load videos in HD or HQ, which is very extremely disappointing because that’s the only way I will watch videos now. Well if the options presented anyway. If I had to watch it with the other option, that’s totally fine by me. That was a huge problem.
In comparison with Chrome, they load it extremely quick. Well, HQ did anyway. HD a bit slower but I mean that’s not a problem. HD is certainly much bigger than HQ.
With Blue Café which is a local website I tested it with, it did fairly well at loading it, but it had a few problems deciding that okay yeah a website usually does have images. It sometimes just didn’t load any images and they were random images too. Things on tables and things such as my avatar or my signature—it just didn’t load it sometimes. I couldn’t explain why. It could be a bug. I don’t know. But when I tested it in Chrome, it loaded fast, it loaded every single image that is on the page which well is obviously a plus for Chrome and red X for Internet Explorer 8.
As with the Safari 4 review, I chose to end this one off by testing Gmail. I used two Gmail account and sometimes three. I manage, two YouTube and of course sometimes three as with the third Gmail account and I wanted to see how fast I could load Gmail and use its features. To my surprise it actually did pretty well. There has been one little bug that I encountered but it only happened once and it’s happening within other browsers, so I'm not going to knock Internet Explorer for that. And that bug was—I marked up on my folders and I marked my email messages red and added my labels and I left it. I closed the browser and I walked away. I came back about an hour later to check my email once again, and to my surprise all my settings were undone. My email messages were apparently all red, my labels were removed and a few messages that I had deleted back in the inbox. But as I said, that has happened to me in Firefox and Chrome before, so I'm not going to knock Internet Explorer for that one.
I know a lot of people will question me on this because I didn’t really touch on a lot in the video, but security. I actually never had any problems with security with Internet Explorer 8. No spy ware getting in, nothing trying to install itself, no toolbars, no nothing not even pop-ups. It was pretty good. So security wise, this is actually a pretty secure browser. Then again, I didn’t indulge too far into downloaded websites or anything like that. I played it pretty safe.
To sum it up, it’s a pretty good browser. Good but not great. It could be great if Microsoft takes the time to re-iron out a lot of the bugs with it. What Microsoft should be doing is paying attention to Mozilla and Google. They are really setting the standard for browsers today. And if Microsoft is not careful their market share for Internet Explorer will even lower and that could be bad news for them. Not completely bad news, but I mean they could have a great browser, a great product. But if they don’t put any effort into it, it’s going to fail and it’s going to fail hard and fast.
Thanks for watching guys. Have a great evening.
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