You might have noticed recently that there is an upgrade waiting for you that would put Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on your computer. IE8 is the latest Web browser from Microsoft.

IE8 is generally a nice upgrade from IE7, the browser that most of us use every day to surf the Web. But it's not perfect.

The most noticeable improvement is its enhanced Tabs. Tabs have been in Internet Explorer for several years (after Microsoft stole the concept from Firefox). In IE8, though, whenever you open a new tab for a new Web site, IE8 will color-code your tabs for you, so you can see at a glance which tabs belong to which group of pages. The key is to open tabs from within the links of an open Web page to keep the tab in the same color. If you open a tab separately, any pages you open in new tabs from that page will be in a different color. This is a great visual aid -- but be careful. The browser could open several pages in the same color -- even if they are from different Web sites. It all depends on how you open the new tab: as a fresh tab, or from an already open page.

Closing your tabs is a bit smarter, too. In older versions, clicking on the X in the top right corner would give you the choice of closing all tabs or canceling. In IE8, it does one better, by asking you whether you want to close all tabs or just the current tab. This is a much smarter set of options, likely to fit more closely to what the user wants to do when he clicks on the X.

Users of all experience levels will like the way IE8 highlights the domain by bolding it in the address field, thereby allowing every user to see at a glance whether they are really at the Web site they expect -- because devious people often try to trick users by impersonating known Web sites. For instance, a malicious Web site might show a link that looks like www.post-gazette.com, but the actual link address might be www.myfakeweb.com/post-gazette. In essence, a user thinking he is going to the Post Gazette site would actually be going to myfakeweb.com. This would be much more obvious with IE8 than with previous Microsoft browsers. IE8 also has features that will tell you if the browser determines the site is trying to steal a password. Taken together, these make for a browsing experience that is safer than with previous versions of IE.

The biggest problem with Internet Explorer 8 is that it breaks Web sites. That is, there are lots of sites that look good in IE7 but are squished, or otherwise malformed when viewed in IE8.

Microsoft has included a compatibility mode that makes IE8 behave a lot like IE7 did -- and that fixes some of the problems, but not all. The most common compatibility problem I have encountered involves calendars and tables with columns that are collapsed instead of full width. The worst problem that I encountered was with a Web mail software that closed suddenly and didn't properly open message windows. Ironically, the software that misbehaved was Microsoft's own Outlook Web Access.

Sophisticated and even intermediate users will see several other features that make IE8 a good upgrade; but most users probably won't bother to use much more than what I've discussed above. In general, I like IE8 and haven't found any major flaws so far -- only a handful of nuisance problems. You can download it through Windows Update or from Microsoft.com.