IE8 Public Beta

By The Scarecrow
in Web Browser Discussion & Support

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Grand Master

PGHammer

Posted
Posted
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).

Grand Master

Ricardo Gil

Posted
Posted
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".

Grand Master

+Ryster Subscriber²

Posted
  • Subscriber²
Posted
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.

Grand Master

PGHammer

Posted
Posted
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".

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.)

Grand Master

Ricardo Gil

Posted
Posted

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...

Grand Master

Dane

Posted
Posted
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.

Experienced

Maximum Error

Posted
Posted
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...

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!

Grand Master

torrentthief

Posted
Posted (edited)

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

Edited by torrentthief
Proficient

Admodieus

Posted
Posted

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

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted
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...

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...

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