Microsoft published the big news in February – new version of Internet Explorer is coming and it shall support all web standards. On March 5th 2008, the general public Beta version was released. Halleluja !

Don’t get drunk and delete IE7 hacks too soon. I’ve installed the new Beta release and is just terrible. Besides crashes and slowness, when several tabs are open, the new version may support all web standards, but none of the sites I visited, was shown correctly.

The only good “new thing” in IE8 is the “Emulate IE7” button, which takes you back in the IE7 times. Microsoft said, that their goal is to improve “security, ease of use, and RSS, CSS, and Ajax support”. Are we talking about the same browser? CSS improvements are seen on almost every page i’ve visited with IE8 - all crashed. How can you improve RSS support? It works or it doesn’t. However you show it, it’s still just XML. Ofcourse the AJAX support is just brilliant – it’s works like in previous version.

Maybe I’m just harsh, nevertheless it’s Beta version, they might fix all these errors .. but still, new version won’t be perfect. Additional “IE hacks” will be needed, while some of the users won’t upgrade to IE8.

On Windows XP Pro (SP2), 2.4GHz, 2GB ram ..

Fancy new look of CNN.COM in IE8 ..

IE7/IE8 switch button ..

p.s. If you’re using WordPress 2.5 in IE and thinking about upgrading – don’t. You won’t be able to upload media, write/edit posts, ..