Internet Explorer 8 Public beta
Microsoft has released a public beta for Internet Explorer 8. This release is intended to help web designers and web developers prepare for the upcoming version of the browser.
Some of the most important features for developers are the improved compatibility and interoperability and the new developer toolbar which enables developers to quickly debug HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript in a visual development environment. Other improvements are the full integration for cascading style sheets, version 2.1 as well as the HTML improvements like the separate URL handing for attributes.
Easier and faster, Internet Explorer 8 will offer three different rendering modes :
- Quirks mode which supports Internet Explorer 5 and legacy browsers
- Strict mode which supports Internet Explorer 7 and is accessed through the emulate Internet Explorer 7 button
- Internet Explorer 8 standards mode
Some new features are also added. For example Activities and WebSlices.
Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage.
WebSlices behave just like feeds in that users can subscribe to them and receive update notifications when the content changes.
View the full list of features on the Microsoft website
Download Internet Explorer 8 public beta (for web designers and developers)
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Comments
Yeah, Andi the developer toolbar is pretty interesting. Also a feature I forgot to mention in the article is the “Emulate IE 7″ button. Makes the browser behave, navigate and display pages like IE 7. That’s also an interesting tool for developers.
Perhaps a similar toolbar will soon be spread out across different web browser platforms such as Firefox.
I found a lot of bugs while using this latest IE browser. I think IE7 is better than it. Though, it’s not yet final…
btw, aol.com looks like trash on IE8 
I really hope that ie8 is better than ie7. Now I don’t know whether it’s because I’m using Windows Vista or not, but ie7 is very unstable for me. I use Firefox for all my browsing unless the site is built for Internet Explorer only. Even then I have found that Safari will work in many of those cases.
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