IE8 is finally out of beta.  Aesthetically, IE8 has improved – the bulging tabs (for tabbed browsing) are replaced by a more subtle gradient version.  Functionality-wise, I believe there’s nothing significant to note about.  The other browsers have most, if not all, of them.

In my opinion, browser wars are now reduced to performance (page rendering speed and crash prevention), security (passwords and other private data) and user interface aesthetics.

I’m happy with the aesthetic improvement of IE8 but I still don’t like that the refresh and stop buttons are on the right side of the browser.  I have stopped using IE (as my favorite browser) when Firefox came along.  I still use IE8 for testing though.

Currently, my favorite browsers are Firefox and Chrome.  I just can’t put away firefox because of its add-ons (especially the Alexa Sparky).  Firefox icons suck.  In my opinion, IE has the best icon among current leading browsers.  Chrome’s icon, while not that bad, looks a lot like Microsoft Visual Studio’s.

Aesthetically, I like Chrome because the toolbars at the top is not as cluttered and the status bar at the bottom just pops up when needed.  Because of these aesthetic improvements made by Chrome, page content area is much bigger so you see more text (or graphics).  However, I’ve had problems running Flash movies from Chrome (freezing) and usually when my notebook goes into sleep mode and I wake it, Chrome freezes.