IE8 Beta 1 is Released

March 5, 2008 at 11:57 am 
Filed Under Mozilla, Technology
9727 people have read this post.

mixo8I had been under the impression that the techbeta for IE8 was going to be closed. Apparently, this was wrong information on my part. With the Mix08 conference occurring today, the first beta of IE8 is now available. You can find a list of features on the Microsoft site.

You can get the Vista version here and the XP version here, if you are so inclined. I plan on taking a look at it in some detail and comparing it to the feature set that I know from IE8.

With the release of this today, there are also videos discussing IE8 or demoing it from various members of the IE team. They are in Windows formats but Videolan can play them if you aren’t on a Windows machine.

Below are some screenshots from XP that I quickly took. Please click on them for the full sized image for the full browser shots. I did note that if you select the “Emulate IE7″ button, you need to completely restart the browser.

ie8-beta1-setup
IE8 First Run Prompt

ie8-beta1-firstrun
IE8 First Run Screen (note “Emulate IE7 button”)

ie8-beta1-ie7-mode-note
Note from First Run page on IE7 Emulation

ie8-beta1-acid2
IE8 doing the Acid2 Test (run by me)

ie8-beta1-acid3-prompt
IE7 doing Acid3 Test (MSXML 3.0 prompts the first time it is used)

ie8-beta1-acid3
IE8 doing Acid3 test after accepting prompt (17?! Firefox 3 gets 66 so far…)

Update: I’ve added the CSS3 Selector Test as well:

ie8-beta1-css3-selector

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Comments

10 Responses to “IE8 Beta 1 is Released”

  1. Wavatar Mardeg on March 5th, 2008 12:31 pm

    Could you include a screenshot of the CSS3 selector test? (click my name for the link)

  2. Wavatar Jeroen on March 5th, 2008 12:47 pm

    I see IE8 highlights the TLD-domain. The nightly’s of Firefox have done something similar, but it was dropped after people where heavily complaining about the readability of the URL’s. The subdomain was almost invisible for a lot of people. So I’m a bit surprised to see it pop-up in the IE8 beta now.

    But a least a try from MS to finally pick up with the standards and that’s a thing to encourage. ;)

  3. Wavatar funtomas on March 5th, 2008 12:55 pm

    Nice examination. Have you tried Daniel’s CSS3 test suite?

  4. Wavatar Al on March 5th, 2008 1:07 pm

    I’ve added a screenshot of the CSS3 Selector test.

  5. Wavatar John on March 5th, 2008 1:15 pm

    progress
    yay

  6. Wavatar bungle on March 5th, 2008 2:20 pm

    Acid 2 Test here:
    http://acid2.acidtests.org/

    Fails with IE8?!

    What’s going on?

  7. Wavatar Al on March 5th, 2008 2:25 pm

    I saw some weirdness in Firefox 3 the first time I used that link. I think that there may be a server issue.

  8. Wavatar David Naylor on March 5th, 2008 3:50 pm

    great links, thx

  9. Wavatar First impressions of IE8 » Broken Links on March 5th, 2008 4:19 pm

    [...] observations from Al Billings, The Register; more [...]

  10. Wavatar Internet Exporer 8: Le migliori risorse | Insel der Engel' on March 7th, 2008 3:13 pm

    [...] IE8 Beta 1 is Released [...]

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