Internet Explorer 8 is a very good browser, especially when compared to IE7 and (ugh) IE6. However, it still lags behind most of the other browsers in both performance and standards compliance. That doesn't seem to bother Microsoft, which has been pushing IE8 using hype that they rarely use even for Windows or Office.First comes Microsoft's appeal to your sense of altruism. If you'll just download and try Internet Explorer 8, the company will donate eight meals to charity. Those must be some cheap meals, though; the fine print says the company is donating just $1.15 per download, up to a maximum of $1,000,00. Still, it's an interesting way to get you to try the browser.

Next, Microsoft is trying a you-could-get-lucky contest. If you live in Australia, you can follow the clues and have a chance to win AUD$10,000 (about $8,000 US dollars) if you can find the hidden web page using IE8. In a "best of both worlds" move, you can feed people by downloading from the charity site, then get some for yourself by competing in the contest.

Finally, if an appeal to your altruism or greed didn't work, Microsoft is trying to convince you that IE8 is the logical choice based on performance and features. This one really bothers me because it is stretching the truth way too much. Firefox has a much wider variety of plugins, for example, so it cleans up in customizability no matter what Microsoft says.

There is no way that Microsoft can claim anything close to parity with standards compliance of the other major browsers. For example, IE8 retains a non-standard event model that does not get anywhere close to the W3C standard published in 2000. Just a few examples: Form elements don't bubble events. There is a global event object instead of an event argument passed to the handler. Rather than document.addEventListener, IE uses the non-standard document.attachEvent method.

Despite these Microsoft campaigns, IE8 is definitely by far the best version of Internet Explorer. I just think Microsoft is trying too hard, and looking too desperate, with these efforts. If your company plans on standardizing on Internet Explorer for whatever reason, IE8 is your best bet. Be aware, however, that the other major browsers are still ahead in many categories and are moving faster than Microsoft seems to be able to move. There's no real danger that Microsoft will be left behind -- it's too big for that to happen -- but even with these improvements it's possible that IE will still define the browser's lower bound in a few year's time.