Joe Hayes {dot} Org

I’m all about trying the latest software, beta or not, and usually I keep it and work through the bugs as it reaches the official release. Internet Explorer 8 was no exception, and unlike many other folks in my industry I’ve never caught onto the whole Firefox thing. It’s not that I knock Firefox, it’s a great program (as is the upcoming Chrome), I’m just resistant to change.

What I liked about Internet Explorer 8

The program has loads of potential, and I believe it’s way better than IE7 or any other previous versions. It’s really fast, it crashes less (I was using Beta 2) than the previous version - and when it does crash it will recover itself and reload what you were previously viewing. Also, if one instance of the program crashes it won’t crash the other, as they run separately (very smart). It has some smart anti-phishing capabilities and highlights the domain you’re on (which actually I find kind of annoying but I see the usefullness for less savy surfers). Also, for developers it passes the ACID2 CSS test, which certainly helps silence some of those in the ”standards compliance” crowd that has been pushing Firefox for the last few years.

What I didn’t like about Internet Explorer 8

It’s not inherintly the current developers of IE8’s fault, though thanks to predicessors  many CSS drivenb websites have had to serve different stylesheets to IE6 and IE7 users, essentially a ‘hack’ to make sure their websites display properly in the many different browsers. Unfortunately, now that IE8 is compliant, it’s throwing up false positives for those using different IE stylesheets thus rendering the page’s layout completely broken and sometimes unreadable. I found that about 1/3 of websites I visited looked broken in IE8 and were required to run in “compatability mode”, essentially running as IE7. I ended up just making IE8 just run in compatability mode as default because I got tired of having to push the compatability button. And since IE8 is still in beta, Google’s Toolbar (which I run for pagerank display) and a few other helpful toolbars I use for my craft, either work when they feel like or don’t work at all.

How To Remove IE8 From Windows Vista

So I decide, after two months of running IE8, to remove it until other programs catch up. I got tired of switching to Firefox to get information I was used to getting from Internet Explorer. So I figured it’d be as easy as going to Start => Control Panel => Programs => Uninstall A Program and remove it from the list. Wrong. Apparently IE8 isn’t a program - thus it’s not there. So, where the heck is it? Ahh, there it is - it’s an update.

To uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from Windows Vista, while in the Uninstall A Program area, look to the left for “view installed updates.” From there drill down and find “Windows Internet Explorer 8…” and you can now remove it. Doing so will automagically revert you back to IE7.