Internet Explorer 8 dropped in March 2009, right at the tail end of the browser wars, and it was Microsoft’s last big push before Chrome started eating everyone’s lunch. It finally brought features people had been begging for—tab isolation so one bad page didn’t nuke your whole session, private browsing (a.k.a. InPrivate), and way better security against the endless spyware pop-ups of the era. IE8 also introduced “Web Slices” and “Accelerators,” which sounded cooler than they actually were, and it was the first version to halfway respect modern web standards—though it still broke plenty of sites. It ran on Windows XP, Vista, and 7, and if you ever remember waiting three extra beats for a page to load, that’s the IE8 experience burned into your brain.