Is this IE8 downloadable as a file you can keep?

Running WinXP 32-bit, I've avoided Internet Explorer 8 for various reasons for quite a long time but I might now give it a try. I see that it's available to download here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/internet-explorer...

Does anyone know if when you click on the Download you're given an option to simply save the IE8 file on download for installation at your leisure, or whether it automatically both downloads and installs in one operation as per downloads from Windows Update? I want to avoid the latter of those two.

What you are looking for is a download file called IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU which is saved and installed at your leisure. Can be found here

Any reason for not moving on to IE9?

In fairness I use FF 5.0, but if had to use IE, it would be 9 simply because of the HTML5 support.

http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

IE10 looks like it will be far closer to the competition than IE8 or IE9. Things such as CSS rounded corners (border-radius) work with IE9, but not in IE8 for example.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Any reason for not moving on to IE9?

Unfortunately IE9 will not work with XP.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie9-wind...

My mistake. I just assumed the 32-bit version would work.

In that case, while I'm not the sort of person who badgers folk to change browser, I would consider an alternative to IE8. I used to be an IE6/7/8 user. Quite happily. However, I got bugged by something then tried FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari and IE9. Decided to plump for FF5 at the time. Haven't yet had a good enough reason to upgrade the version yet.

Edited by camieabz (Tue 17-Apr-12 00:22:40)