Internet Exporer holds appeal for the adult industry because of its private browsing feature, called InPrivate. But with speedier, more relevant (and adult-friendly) competition out there, Internet Explorer may lose more of its market share among industry professionals as well as the general public.
Tech pundits have criticized IE for its slowness, cluttered interface and lack of compatibility with a large number of websites. Analyst Erick Schonfeld said that with this new release, Microsoft is once again relying on its formidable user base.
"If you’ve already left IE for a speedier browser, IE8 is not going to bring you back, and Microsoft knows it," he wrote for TechCrunch.com.
Schonfeld praised Apple's Safari browser, which rolled out a vastly improved fourth version last month. Safari also includes a porn mode, known as Private Browsing.
On another front, tech analyst Rob Pegoraro slammed IE's lack of compatibility with many websites. A long-running complaint among web designers is how hard it is to make a site work in IE, and version 8 doesn't look like it's going to alleviate that stress.
"Microsoft changed its 'compatibility view,' provided for pages written for earlier versions of IE that paid less heed to Web standards, in a way that causes IE 8 to label most Web pages with compatibility view's broken-page icon," he wrote for the Washington Post. "Microsoft says this issue doesn't affect how most pages look or work, and that Web developers can easily work around it. But a Web browser's most basic job is to display the Web accurately, and in this respect IE 8 fails."
On the plus side, IE8 will offer a list of recently closed tabs and new gizmos that Microsoft is calling "Accelerators." This new feature will let IE users activate an array of quick shortcuts found under the right-click menu.
The Accelerator idea is similar to a previous invention by Mozilla, purveyors of the Firefox browser. Last year, Mozilla rolled out a new plugin called Ubiquity, which let Firefox users access an ever-growing choice of handy shortcuts through a small, simple text field.
To download the new version of IE, visit Microsoft.com.