Andre Yoskowitz
19 Mar 2009 17:39
Microsoft has announced the mass availability of their popular browser Internet Explorer 8 today, hoping the new safer, faster browser will help the company win back some market share it has been slowly losing.
“Customers have made clear what they want in a Web browser — safety, speed and greater ease of use,” added Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match.”
The updated browser has been in beta since January and Microsoft says they have taken feedback from "millions of customer sessions."
Microsoft says IE8 "blocks two to four times more malware attacks than other browsers," including Firefox and Safari.
Additionally, the software giant says IE8 is "one of the fastest browsers on the market today," beating out other browsers fifty percent of the time on page loading tests.
According to the press release IE8 also adds the following:
Accelerators. Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.
Web Slices. Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8 makes favorite information from sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web.
Visual search suggestions. The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time.
The updated browser is available in 25 different languages; Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified and Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
Download Internet Explorer v8.0 from AfterDawn.com