So on Tuesday I came into the office to an email from Brent announcing Microsoft’s u-turn on IE8’s default behavior. Great news for us developer types as that now means that we wouldn’t have to start using ‹meta› tags to force IE8 to act, well, like IE8.
Today, at MIX’08, Microsoft unveiled IE8. Thanks to Jeremy Keith & Jonathan Snook’s tweets I got the latest on webslices and the link to download the beta—which I promptly did.
Now if you are running Vista it seems IE8 installs pretty quickly. I, on the other hand, run XP Pro and had to install a couple of “critical” things from Microsoft and then do two restarts. Some things never change.
After that IE8 runs pretty nicely. It doesn't look a lot different from the current IE7, but I assume that may change a little nearer launch. A couple of things that are different are the “emulate IE7” button (which requires the browser to restart) and a developer tools button which launches a new window with built-in tools akin to Pederick’s web developer toolbar or Hewitt’s Firebug add-on.
I’m going to be trying it out over the coming weekend and hopefully getting some more insights at SXSW.
Technorati tags: ie8, microsoft, browser, beta
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