Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

March 5, 2008

Mix 08 (website) is going on at this very moment
You can download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows XP here. At the bottom page of the page there are download links for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, but these are broken at the time of writing.
The welcome page you’ll see when firing up the beta.
Uploaded a few screenshots to Flickr
The developer toolbar in IE8 Beta 1 is the same as the IE7 developer toolbar.
There is a button to emulate IE7 behavior, but you have to restart IE8 to activate it.
There is very little space for tabs on 1024x resolution with the default options, but you can customize your toolbar. If you kick out the buttons you don’t use it’s way better.
Fast compatibility test: my site didn’t break, surprise surprise. Our company website looked fine. MSNBC looked just about perfect. The new BBC homepage showed a few glitches, nothing too bad.
For those interested in the technical side, here’s the Windows Internet Explorer Testing Center. IE8 supports some stuff that not even the latest versions of Safari and Firefox have; as we know it supports rendered content and some of the handy CSS selectors we’ve been missing the past year (first and last child, no nth child though).
A lot of official information from the IE team. This site contains a few links to some interesting tutorials in PDF format, originally intended for the people who are attending the MIX conference.

Mike said:

They’re still developing for XP? I thought that by IE 8 they should have gotten everybody to Vista, no?
*grin*
March 5th, 2008 at 8:18 ∞
Bramus! said:

My Experiences with IE8 so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bramus/tags/ie8/ :-S
March 5th, 2008 at 8:48 ∞

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