Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 disappoints; switching back to IE7

I recently uninstalled Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and went back to using the previous version of the market-leading Web browser.
Microsoft released IE8 on March 19, but I didn’t install it until last month. I used it for two or three weeks on my Windows XP desktop PC before going back to IE7.
IE8 had some notable improvements – new security features and better management of tabs – but it had a fatal flaw for me: It was painfully slow. It would hang up when loading some Web pages. It could take minutes for IE8 to launch Google’s Blogger application, for instance.
I’ve seen comments online about IE8 using a lot of memory. That sounds like a reasonable explanation.
I’ll miss some of IE8’s advancements, such as isolating browser crashes to one tab and not the whole browser. But the slowness of IE8 was a deal breaker for me.
Another thing I didn’t like about IE8 was the fact that it wouldn’t remember which folder I was using to save Web bookmarks. It always defaulted back to the main favorites listing and I had to select the folder or subfolder I was using. IE7 always remembered which folder I was last using.
If there was a way to get IE8 to remember the last bookmarks folder used, I couldn’t find it in the help menu.
By the way, I’ve tried Internet Explorer’s main rival, the open source Firefox browser, but I’m not sold on it.