For those who might deliberately want to 'upgrade' your browsing experience and try the brand spanking new Internet Explorer 8 (both of you), knock yourself out.

IE8 is finally out of beta and can be nabbed from Microsoft's' IE8 home page or download centre. I would have expected it to show in Windows Update as well but as of the time I write this no such update is available.

I've talked about the beta version not too long ago and it appears the final version doesn't offer anything more other than being a stable release but MS are pimping security as IE8's biggest draw card, which isn't such a bad thing. If you're still using IE6 please make the effort to upgrade this time.

I plan to install IE8 in a Virtual Box over the weekend to see how it goes and more importantly see how it renders some popular web sites now that it is allegedly more standards complaint. Oh the joy of knowing us web developers now have to test and fix issues in IE6, IE7 and now IE8. Yay for Microsoft.

I am hoping that Microsoft also make an official announcement to drop support for IE6 and IE7. The truth is that it's dumb to have multiple versions of your browser out there and try to support them all. If they do it right they won't lose any of their market share.

Finally, it wouldn't be a proper blog about Internet Explorer from me if I didn't also mention that there are much better browsers out there, Firefox being the best of them. Don't act so surprised.