Internet Explorer 8 Beta Available to Download

All of you intrepid beta testers will be pleased to know that Internet Explorer 8 is now available to download. It is, however, a beta, so problems can, and will ensue.

To see what was new, I downloaded the browser for my Vista 64-bit system and the installation was an absolute breeze overall. But, it didn’t take long before the browser crashed. The first page that arises will prompt you to download a plugin, and when selecting that option, the browser crashes. So, it’s very clear to me that the browser is not ready for prime-time, just yet.

New in this version are better adherence to web-standards, but you can expect that to break up a few of your favorite websites. You can see in the image below what it did to this site… and our code is rather clean and follows many standard guidelines. Plus, contrary to what we were led to believe, a default installation did not pass the Acid2 test.

If you are an avid user of Internet Explorer, it’s not worth trying out unless you don’t mind performing a system restore shortly after. While you can emulate IE7 within IE8, bugs still occur and are annoying. In all fairness though, many of the nags I experienced might actually be an isolated incident.

Internet Explorer 8 Users can discover WebSlices within a webpage and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to the webpage, detects changes in the WebSlice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and click-through to the website to get more information.

Source: IE8 Beta Download Page