• D: All Things Digital, Thursday, March 19, 2009 12 PM

As Personal Technology's Walt Mossberg points out, when Microsoft makes changes to its browser, Internet Explorer, "vast numbers of people" are affected. Well, today, the software giant is making its biggest change to IE in years, with the new IE8.

In a lengthy article, Mossberg reviews the updated version after months of testing. "I've found it to be a big improvement over its predecessor, IE7, and a much closer competitor to its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox," he says. In short, "IE8 is more stable than IE7, more compatible with industrywide Web standards, and packed with new features that improve navigation, search, ease of use, privacy and security."

A few of the new features include color-coded related tabs, a search field that shows images as well as text, and "instant fly-out maps" of place names in Web pages. Marketers will note that users can also hide their tracks more easily from advertisers. However, Mossberg says IE8 isn't as fast as Firefox, Safari or Google's Chrome -- especially when juggling a large number of open Web page tabs, which is why, ultimately, "I can't say that IE8 dethrones my previous browser champ, Firefox."

Read the whole story at D: All Things Digital »