Internet Exporer 8 - total rubbish

I must be one of the few people left in the World who writes a heading like that. To normal people it is abbreviated to 'IE8', but there you go. Whatever to call it, I am far from impressed. This latest incarnation of Explorer has left me completely dumbfounded.

I downloaded IE8 a couple of weeks ago, and for one reason mainly: it's current. I have a longstanding fear of anything Microsoft not being bang 'up to the minute' for security vunerability reasons. Download went fine, and so did installation.

The problems began when I started using it. It will not start up without crashing once, and man, it truly crawls when it does decide to work. Microsoft have added one signifigant new feature too: when selecting something from the drop - down list of visited web addresses, you accidentally delete it off the list.

This seems to happen readily with everything except - strangely - Microsoft's own Hotmail. It's like MS took a good look at IE and went "so what can we do to improve it? - I know, let's disimprove it!". Explorer 7 was ( mostly ) fine, but this is a landfill incarnation of the browser.

I find myself using Firefox more and more these days, and suddenly Google Chrome - which I have to admit I liked already - is beginning to look a whole lot better. From my experience of the whole 'MSN Live' thing, I think Microsoft have given up altogether.