Another Day With My PC

Microsoft’s announcement that it will release the public beta version if Internet Explorer 8 during the third quarter of this year drew mixed reactions from both fans and foes of the most widely-used browser in the world.

Redmond has already released a beta version several months ago for developers. Unfortunately, it drew flack on many of those who tested it. But that’s not surprising though, considering that IE8’s authors precisely released it to the experts so that they could put a few cents on it.

Of course, the public beta version would already be about a mile and a half better than the previous test release. While Microsoft’s purpose of releasing the unpolished product is for people to be bugged by it and for them to report the annoyances that they’ve experienced when using it as a surfboard on the Internet, still many welcome this pass-the-responsibility-of-detecting-the-bugs move or policy of Microsoft. I guess many are of the opinion that it’s better to be bugged now when we’re ready with the repellants.

I just hope that IE8 would be a lot faster and more secure than the current one that we’re using. Sometimes, a quad-core, spyware-free PC still seems to be a laggard due to the sloth-y Web browsers that we’re using. Security is also a main concern. Take note that many of the malware that we inadvertently welcome in our systems come from the Internet. Gone are the days when viruses get introduced to our PC by carelessly exchanging floppy disks or other storage media from friends or officemates. Everything is done online now, and our browsers are our primary gateway to cyberspace.

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