Stay with IE8 or what?

Our 5-year old Dell (Pentium 4, 1GB RAM) has served us well and continues to satisfy our needs. Since buying it we have upgraded Windows XP to SP3 and IE6 was upgraded to IE7 which in turn was upgraded to IE8. Email and internet surfing makes up at least 80% of what we do on our PC.

Since IE9 will not run on Windows XP I'm wondering if it's time to switch to some other internet browser (to stay current) or just 'sit pat' with IE8. I would appreciate any advice/suggestions.

Wendi

 

Hi Wendi,

It seems as if you (and family?) are pretty comfortable with IE8, so I think the best answer to your question is to "sit pat" with IE8 until Microsoft no longer supports it (in particular, when they stop providing security updates). I don't believe that date is yet known, but when that time comes (and if you are still using the same Dell PC), you would be well advised to switch browsers.

JA

 

I agree, IE8 should be fine for some time to come since MS will continue to support it until we hear otherwise. If you get curious, you could try some of the others, but there's no reason why IE8 shouldn't continue to satisfy your needs.

 

Wendi, I'm in a very similar situation so I share your concern (from a security perspective). As I see it, we have to be concerned with two expiration dates, the unknown IE8 support expiration (which Jo Ann alluded to) and the known expiration date for extended support of WinXP (which is August 2014). So it's probably wise for both of us to migrate to a newer PC platform by then!

 

So it seems that I've still got 4-years to go before 'it's time to say goodbye' and that is good news. It didn't occur to me that loss-of-support for Windows XP likely occurs sooner than that for IE8.

Thanks very much for the advice.

 

Go for Iron with extentions New tab behaviour, WOT and SiteAdvisor for Chrome

 

Sorry Kees, but all of that is 'greek' to me...
....Can you please elaborate?

 

It's OK to stick in your comfort zone for now but I'd rather tell you to start exploring alternative browsers than to wait till MS decided the "deathday" of IE8...

At the very least, you and your family will have the time to accustomize yourselves with the other browsers that are 'current' which is important since you've stated that "Email and internet surfing makes up at least 80% of what we do on our PC."

 

There appears to be 0 reason for you not to stick with IE8 since you like it as it is.

 

You might like to have a look at Firefox 4 (currently beta 6). Hardware acceleration is partially supported on XP which should make for better performance compared with IE8. The beta is very stable and the "final" is coming before the end of the year.

 

Thanks to all for your suggestions. Since I still have a few years before MS pulls the plug on my setup, I will checkout Chrome/Iron and Firefox.

But I'm not stopping there ...I'm going to really be adventurous and start playing with a Linux live-edition!

 

I have used a variety of browsers and I think that if you are comfortable with IE8 stay with that.

If you want to pursue another browser Opera isn't a bad alternative.

 

IE8 is pretty slow.

i'd recommend Google Chrome.

 

For me, it is FF 4 + IE 8 for the next months. I need IE 8 to use certain financial sites that have never worked in FF. I tried IE 9 beta and in one of these sites I could not even get past login (“page not found”). Besides, I really did not like very much the new IE 9 interface, although the browser is fast and seems to be more stable than FF 4 beta 6.

 

Robin, for at least some financial sites, you can trick them into thinking FF is IE by tweaking FF's User Agent string.

And for problems with IE 9, you may have to try the "compatibility mode" to give the site the impression you're accessing it with IE 6, 7, or 8.