Internet Explorer 8 went bananas today, turns out it was an anti-phishing play all along

Now while you and myself would never stoop to using Internet Explorer 8, after all Chrome would cry, IE8 is the world’s most popular browser. And so when today the browser began to shoot off fireworks in every direction, many, many people were very unhappy.

There was a problem in the feature called SmartScreen Filter, a tool that warns users of IE8 when they hit a page that Microsoft has marked as malicious, usually in regards to phishing. It helps to keep people safe, and similar features can be found in other browsers, perhaps most notably in Chrome.

However, just for today, and just for Internet Explorer 8 (not 9, as it turns out), SmartScreen Filter went on a bender, telling users that hundreds of websites that in fact were not malicious, were.

You can see the potential annoyance for the average Joe, cruising about looking for something to tickle their fancy, only to have IE8 toss up a roadblock to a trusted site. Accoding to ZDnet, among the sites temporarily marked as dangerous were financial and banking websites.

What went wrong? No one seems to know yet, but Microsoft claims to have solved the problem, at least according to their Twitter account. Let’s hope that IE9 never has this problem.