I understand that IE8 is going to be a public beta. Does anyone happen to know when that will be?

June, roughly.

IE8 Beta 1 for public will coming this month!

Scratch my previous post, it should be out to the public later today, the download page is now up! I was not expecting this:

http://digg.com/software/IE8_Download_Page...atures_Revealed

And from the features revealed *so far*, as long as none of them get killed, Firefox is in a world of hurt (at least for Windows).

Was that sarcasm?

Activities and webslices-> Extensions
Favorites bar? Now that's something new...
ACR? Welcome to a few years ago...
Improved Fishing->ok, I'll give it the benefit of doubt...

I'm excited about a new IE but these are hardly new features to put Firefox in "a world of hurt".

You are correct that IE is playing catch up, and it all depends on how good Microsoft's implementation of these features is, but comparing third party add-ons and extensions to a core feature of the browser isn't really fair.

The bigger difference: IE 8 (as opposed to Firefox) includes them with the browser (not a separate add-in/extension/plug-in).
Automatic Crash Recovery (down to the tab level) is something that's in no browser currently (certainly not Firefox or IE, though both support tabbed browsing) unless (again) you're referring to a separate add-in/plug-in/extension for Firefox. If it's important enough to have been a major in-demand add-in/extension for a browser, for quite a while, why *shouldn't* a future version of the same browser include said feature, especially if both browser and extension/add-in are free?
Activities and Webslices (standards-based): having to add this in (via an extension/add-on/plug-in) is what's so yesterday. The really scary part is that it supports both Facebook *and* MySpace (though Microsoft owns neither), whereas Firefox requires separate extensions for each site. While I'm not big into social networks, I know a lot of people are, so I ignore social networking at my peril. Even bigger (for me personally) is that it ties in to not only intranets, but even the contents of the My Documents (Documents in Vista's case) folder on the local PC. (IE 7 (in fact, no version of IE in any form since the "Nashville II" alpha, back when Windows 95 was the primary desktop OS) is utterly incapable of this.)

Firefox added session restore in version 2 (it restores windows and tabs)

Although this "Firefox had it first, no Opera had it first!" is getting old, can we not do it?

It's not about who did it first, it's great that IE is getting these "new" features... but I see it as just that, keeping up to speed.
I just don't see any earth shattering functionality improvement to award it a major version change.

This looks like IE 7.2 or something...

It's only beta 1 though, so they have a way to go. I use firefox now and sometimes use IE7 for some things. So I'll be watching where this goes.

Its a great deal more forward looking than what i have seen from firefox 3 beta 4..... finally IE seems to be moving forward and not just making up lost ground!

new features look nice, got a restore option and favourites bar, those are 2 of the big reasons why i use firefox 2. Good work MS, maybe IE8 might be good afterall.

XP SP2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.as...sXP-x86-ENU.exe

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en
XP SP2 Link

I just got through to the Download site for the Windows XP SP2 version and managed to download it. I'm attempting to upload it to my Skydrive as we speak, then I'll post the link here

Edit: Uploaded them - use these links if the download links aren't live for you yet:

Windows XP SP2
Windows Vista x86

Download link is Live!!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/...ess/Install.htm

Since when does looks mean features? Rendering is a DRASTIC improvement in 8 that alone is goog enough for a new version...




Vista links are live... XP SP2 links are not...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.as...sXP-x86-ENU.exe


XP SP2 link

the links are working.. got the vista version


vista x64 link isn't working though

Vista 64bit version?

Rendered the default homepage incorrectly, it's great.

IE finally having good standards support will finally make some people start writing sites properly

Some quick screens:


The start page.




Urgh.



Dialog box you get when switching to/from Emulate IE7 mode.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110328

umm right there? It's 20.4MB

Oh.. Thanks...

Couldn't get it to work earlier...

I think I shall wait until it's closer to final, I do hope they smooth out the GUI a little, I always found IE7 to be clumsy.

yeah I'm getting the jumbled Neowin headline problem as well...


BTW here's the ACID3 test results:

JavaScript support is still pretty lousy, and it still ignores the mime-type text/plain.

But CSS support is very much improved.

Jebus, the tab bars and links thing are too high.

I prefer ie6 in terms of layout and customization.

Bring back draggable customizable tool bars for god sake.

I won't even considering switching until the header takes less than 50px.

Thanks for the update! Let's try it.

I wonder how long before websites start supporting IE8. The Emulate IE7 button looks to be a good thing to use...even when devloping a webpage.

thanks for the heads up. going to give this a test drive although i'm a firefox lover.

hmm.. i noticed something kinda cool.

the website you're visiting is brighter while the rest is kinda faded in the address bar. Like neowin.net/forums - the rest of the address - forums/xxxx/xxxx/ is all faded but neowin.net is bright. I guess it's probably part of the phishing thing?

Yup. This was highlighted in the video on Channel 10.

Im downloading it now. As far as I know, this does not pass the acid tests. I could be wrong.
Maybe we will see it pass ACID3 by RTM?

Windows Vista 32-bit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

Windows Vista 64-bit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

Windows XP SP2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

its available for download from microsoft now.

A little to late there buddy.

Yeah theres like 5+ other threads on this already lol. Thanks though.

Hmmm the one thing I wish they would change...Is to be able to select text and drag it into the search bar and it searches. Like in firefox, select,drag and drop and its already loading the search.

EPIC FAIL

It passes acid2. There is a brief pause for some reason while it is rendering the page. So give it a couple of seconds and you will see it passes.

Yeah the Acid3 result is awful. WebKit will probably hit 100/100 by this time next week, and yet IE8 and its new standards-compliant engine barely manages anything more than 10 or 11.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really like having half my address grayed out and the rest of it standing out like that.

I just installed IE8 Beta for Vista. It appears to have broken more websites. I really hope this isn't going to be a case where you have to fix web pages where they'll look good in Firefox (all versions will work pretty much the same) and Internet Explorer (where you have to make them work for IE 6, 7, and 8).

Firefox 3 nightly builds with IE Tab works great, definitely sticking with Firefox 3. And, as an added bonus, the browser looks a lot better (and if you don't like the look today, wait until tomorrow, it's changing all the time right now).

I used IE for years and have switched to Firefox just in the past year or two. It's an okay start, but no where near where the browser should be, or should already be.

Screenshots anyone?

ON ie8 if you slect text then click the arrow that appears you can click search to do a search.

It's a decent start, but a ton of sites aren't rendered correctly for me, and it just seems slow for some reason.

One question I have is why is there left/right scroll on the screen no matter what? That's kind of annoying. It also breaks some IE Pro stuff.

i don't have horizontal scroll bars so that must be something with your setup. You are right about some sites not working right tho....

I downloaded IE 8 and it said that I needed to install an update so I chose OK to install the update then it tells me that my computer failed to install the update to press DOWNLOAD to install the update. So, long story short I go to this download page the install takes you to and download the update and when I try to apply the update it tells me that the service pack I'm running (XP SP3) doesn't need this update and I don't need to update.

So, IE 8 tells me I need to update but when I try to update it tells me I don't need the update!!!????!

Anyone else getting this or have a suggestion

I downloaded IE 8 and it said that I needed to install an update so I chose OK to install the update then it tells me that my computer failed to install the update to press DOWNLOAD to install the update. So, long story short I go to this download page the install takes you to and download the update and when I try to apply the update it tells me that the service pack I'm running (XP SP3) doesn't need this update and I don't need to update.

So, IE 8 tells me I need to update but when I try to update it tells me I don't need the update!!!????!

Anyone else getting this or have a suggestion

Heh, not even uk.msn.com shows up right

IE8 is going to render sites wrong if the sites are using hacks and such.

You know how Firefox will render some IE only sites badly?, IE8 is in the same boat now.

And forget about Acid3 guys, lets focus on better CSS 2.1 support first.