Beware Internet Explorer 8

Any major update should be approached with trepidation...but according to this site, there are some issues that can render your system inoperable if you go through with the update to Internet Explorer 8 from Internet Explorer 7.

Have a backup handy first!

He has a link to a tool that his friend at the computer repair shop has used to revert back to IE7, but when I went to the site to grab a copy of the utility I got an error that the user had hit his download limit on that host...

The problem as his friend described it: users upgrade to IE 8 and on reboot you have nothing but wallpaper showing. No icons, nothing usable even in safe mode. He said that he had to use a bootable utility to revert to a restore point, at which point the machine would boot but have USB problems and no ability to connect to the Internet.

The utility rolled back the machine to IE6, and on two of the three machine upgrading again to IE7 worked as expected while that third machine still had USB problems so he had to roll it back down to IE6 until another fix can be found.

Ouch.

Just a bit of warning, that's all. Not too surprising since Internet Explorer has tentacles extending so far into the operating system that when it gets screwed up your whole system can be screwed up (or made vulnerable to malicious attacks)...another reason to use Firefox. Firefox is not tightly integrated with your system so if it gets screwed up then typically it's just your web browser, not your entire operating system, that gets hosed. For me it's nice that it's cross-platform, too. I use Windows, Linux, and OS X and Firefox is available on each of those platforms.