Giving IE8 Beta Another Shot

My home PC is Vista and lately, IE7 has been running extremely slow. I make a page request and sometimes the browser just hangs, or eats up 100% CPU utilization. I run Firefox to fetch the same page, and as soon as Firefox downloads the content, IE becomes “unstuck” and finally shows me the page I was looking for. I probably have an incompatible browser plugin or something, but I had enough. I was going to uninstall IE7 out of spite and just make Firefox my default.

But I decided to give IE8 another try. I’m glad I did.  When I tried it back in March, IE8 was so buggy that it froze on most of the pages I tried to view.  The new version is much cleaner, and its as fast if not faster than Firefox and has several new features that I haven’t fully explored yet.  And best yet, it reported on plugins attached to the browser that would impact performance, namely, my Skype plugin.  I like it. 

According to my stats, only 31 visitors to this site in the past month have used IE8.  So why not give it a try?