I have "Internet Explorer 7"; but being sent UPDATES for "8": what's wrong/what should I do?

I don't know what you have heard about IE 8 but it is much better than 7 as far as security and speed. Good luck!!

well here is a comment i found from a forum. I think this might help you............ I've been playing with the beta for IE 8 throughout most of this afternoon, principally because I'm interested to see what changes, if any, it will make to my client's sites. In the main they display OK, but there is one positioning anomaly I've been struggling with for several hours and cannot find the reason for, so curiosity has prompted me to share it here to see if anyone else can answer it. The following page displays perfectly well, with the centre of the crosshairs lined up on the exact corners on the map image, in over 40 diffrent browsers through which it's been tested. Yet in IE 8 the crosshairs appear displaced downwards! http://lbvfrance.com/test_ie.php (The significance of the crosshairs is that, in the non-IE8 version of this page, red dots are displayed which show the positions of affiliates and the dots need to be pixel-perfect in alignment and the crosshairs help to check this.) Removing the DOCTYPE completely resolves the problem, so obviously it's a compliance issue, but for the life of me I cannot see which bit of the existing code or CSS is causing IE 8 to shout 'Non Compliant' when the Doctype is in place. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is? AT this stage of the IE 8 release this is all pretty academic, but I thought I ought to get a head start on checking compliance because over 90% of this site's visitors use IE 6 or 7 and that group will slowly migrate to IE8

I too, resisted that upgrade to Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702(latest version) and if you are using 7, you should get a prompt constantly, asking if you wish to upgrade - which is completely annoying, by the way. I finally upgraded, to eliminate that annoying pop-up prompt. A friend told me to downgrade back to 7 recently, to stop some of the quirky display issues, but Java fixed those for me. Google Chrome is faster than my FireFox 4.0.4 and sadly, most users forget, that upgrading JavaScript is the fix for an awful lot of issues, that are incorrectly blamed on the browsers, like the one mentioned in one answer above ^, which is why the person couldn't find an issue with the CSS - there wasn't one, yet this person removed the DocType? lol. Java 6.0.1_18, is the latest version. Also, remember to upgrade Net Framework, or you may have some other issues cropping up. The latest is Net Framework 3.0. P.S. Superb answer i. jones ;)

The best advice I can give you is to go to the Mozilla website and download Firefox. It is a much friendlier and faster browser. You probably have IE 7. They will still send you updates for IE 8. Just ignore them for now. At some point you may discover you will need IE 8 or an equivalent browser to do some of the things you want to do. Firefox updates should serve you every bit as well for most applications.