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Internet Explorer 8 suffers from compatibility problems with Web
standards such as CSS, HTML4 and XHTML, according to the results
of The Web Standards Project's Acid Test 3.

The Acid 3 test for compatibility ensures that the browser works well with technologies such as CSS, HTML4 and XHTML. However, the test reveals that IE8 falls far short of scores delivered by other new browser software from Google and Mozilla


Microsoft Corp is boasting about the performance speed of the IE8, but the new browser remains the slowest of the top five on the market.



According to the test findings (which appeared in Computerworld) Google Inc's Chrome led all browsers in the SunSpider tests, making it more than four times faster than IE8. Second was Mozilla Corp's Firefox 3.0.7, followed by Apple Inc's Safari 3.2.2 for Windows and Opera Software's Opera 9.63.


Firefox proved to be 59 per cent faster than IE8, while Safari was 47 per cent faster. Opera, the slowest non-Microsoft production browser, was still 38 per cent faster than IE8.


Walt Mossberg, the personal-technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, criticised IE 8's performance in an All Things Digital post, "Microsoft claims IE 8 is very fast, but in my tests, speed and performance were its worst attributes. Using two computers, one running Windows XP and one running Windows Vista, I timed the loading of a half-dozen popular Web sites, plus two folders containing numerous news and sports sites. I repeated the test in IE 8, and in Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome. In every case, IE 8 loaded the pages and folders more slowly than most of the other browsers, and in most cases, it came in dead last."



IE8 beefs up protection against malware and known phishing scam sites. However, the new browser suffered its first hack just days after its official launch (along with Safari and Firefox browsers).

At a security conference last week in Canada, a hacker exploited a security hole in Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8 in under two hours, taking control of a Sony laptop running an internal build of Windows 7.