Despite the long history of Internet Explorer, born 14 years ago and when it was used as a tool to share documents by FTP, Gopher and Usenet by universities and research institutions, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has still come under constant fire from malware writers and lately, the means to infect machines by botnets.
Although that is the case for most Internet Explorer versions, IE8 was released and offers a bunch of new functions that most users would find interesting and security professionals, a nightmare.
The features bundled with the new IE8 include - Accelerators, InPrivate Browsing, Web Slices, SmartScreen Filter, amongst many others.
In any case, "The new Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 help you quickly perform your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to obtain driving directions, translate and define words, email content to others, search with ease, and more."
Another feature that was noted to be new is IE8's ability to use InPrivate Browsing, which allows users to browse the web without saving history. Sounds familiar? Think of Google Chrome's Incognito mode and Safari's Private Browsing mode.
Steve Gibson, President and Founder of the Gibson Research Corporation noted that IE8 is still the slowest popular browser and the fifth fastest browser under the Sunfire javascript benchmark, cookie handling in IE8 is broken and does not block third-party cookies and that IE8 is still very crashable (unstable) and will re-crash even on reload.
~Security Now!, http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/Security_Now_189
As such, users should exercise caution if the upgrade to IE8 is made, or to continue the more stable and slightly more secure IE7, at least until patches have been released for IE8.