IE8 here too, nowt wrong with it, a good bit snappier than IE7 as well.

But have you tried chrome or firefox for more then 5 minutes? They are twice as fast as IE8.
In terms of firefox I can not live without greesemonkey.
It runs local scripts to change the way sites you go to are viewed. Any annoying thing on facebook like the adds or certain notifications etc?  You can get rid of them.

maybe it is faster... but is it enough to make a difference ?

decent connection and computer = everything loads as fast as you can click it anyway ?

Hell yeah it is a difference, It is not about decent connection.

I have mentioned before about gzipping, compressing your javascript, calling your javascript in the correct manner, Good CSS, no inline css.
Even putting images on a subdomain will speed things up.
Browsers (well IE) can only concurrently load 2 elements at the same time. Firefox, chrome and safari force load 4 but doing the image/media domain tick speeds up performance.
Ever noticed at the bottom when pages are loading on many big sites reading from a domain not of the site? It is their media servers either separate servers all together or sub domains.
Many use the amazon servers to host their images.

I could go on about how browsers render sites but yeah they are a lot faster.

Ok you guys, try this:

It will be IE on the outside but chrome on the inside. It will make your browser run using webkit web standards which are 10 times better then IE. While it wont be as fast as if you used chrome this should be a better browsing experience.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

I agree with Knighty to a degree. However, the point where you really start to see the difference is when youve got a high number of tabs open, each with different flash/java, etc apps in each.

Plus, Internet Explorer has always had this stupid requirement to reconnect every time you open a new tab or window. It takes a good three seconds for me every time I open a new tab before it will actually let me do anything usable with it while it does all its connection and proxy checking malarky.

Now works fine with FF  Shiretoko 3.5.6 PRE