It's apparent that the software giant Microsoft has rolled out its Internet Explorer 8 to tame the Mozilla's surging Firefox. Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 with a number of new features and improvements.

Internet Explorer 8 has come with smarter user interface and faster speed. According to Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, Internet Explorer 8 is uniformly faster at loading Web pages than Firefox 3. Nash says, "I feel very good that IE8 will be a reason to keep using IE, and for our previous customers, who may not be using IE today, IE8 will be a compelling reason to come back."

Microsoft has addressed several security issues in IE8. The web browser has come with several security enhancements that help protecting users against phishing and cross-site-scripting attacks. IE 8 and its bolstered security defenses were in beta testing for about a year. Besides, Internet Explorer 8 has several new cool features, such as "Web slices" that allows users to quickly call up selected content from a Web page - such as updates from an eBay auction page - via the IE8 favorites bar; "accelerators" make it easier to cut and paste text from one page and insert it on another.

Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, says, "IE8 could help the software giant regain ground in these browser wars. So long as IE8 delivers as advertised, I believe it could help slow or even largely halt Windows users moving to alternative browsers. Whether that will be enough to draw back customers who have already migrated remains to be seen."

BUT, Microsoft is not getting the response that it had expected from its Internet Explorer 8. The early users of IE8 are posting somber responses on Microsoft's IE8 feedback page. The users who have tested IE8 are reluctant to adopt the new web browser. Some users have reported that IE8 is causing their systems to crash, while others have reported that IE8 is not loading and displaying some web pages properly and correctly.

On Friday afternoon, StatCounter Global Stats reported that "IE 8 only accounted for about one and a half percent of all internet traffic; which was an increase of less than one and a half percent over Thursday".

According to analysts, one of the biggest hurdles for IE8 is the growing popularity of Mozilla's Firefox. The users who are already using Firefox are not ready to abandon Firefox for IE8. Secondly, Google's Chrome, whose beta is out with improved speed, is offering tough competition to Microsoft's IE8.