And IE8 Beta1 Arrives Did someone change the coffee brands at Microsoft? After taking 6 years to move from version 6 to version 7, the IE team has offered the first IE8 beta barely 18 months after IE7's release. Cosmetically, things don't look all that different to IE7, but under the bonnet -- where most of our nightmares originate -- the IE dev team seems to have set some pretty ambitious goals. To me, the most important stuff includes:
On a similar note, it's probably not wise to install this browser on any critical system at the moment, as it will automatically and permanently overwrite any IE6 and IE7 installs. That would be a brave course to take with a potentially unstable beta. However, if you're keen to have a play, Microsoft has released a version of IE8 embedded in a virtual hard disk image (VHD) that can be run via Virtual PC. Microsoft offers both of these downloads for free, allowing you to freely test the beta while keeping it safely isolated from the rest of your system. This VHD beta will time out in July 2008, at which point you'll need to download an updated image. If you haven't used a VHD before (and a few readers have asked about it), I'll run you through the set up process below. However, before we start, think twice about doing this if your system is lacking either reasonable grunt or good bandwidth access, as you'll need plenty of both to first download the VHD file (a 430+MB file that decompresses to almost 1.4Gig), and then to efficiently run it under Virtual PC.
Attachment 607Attachment 608Attachment 609 The first time I ran this VHD, the system needed to do some housekeeping, and asked me to restart it, but from then on it's been hassle-free. Of course, when you've had enough, use the console to shut it down. So, take it for a spin and let me know what you think. It goes without saying that it's going to be a quite a while before IE8 is a factor in our day-to-day development thoughts. However, though it wasn't obvious at the time, looking back now it seems that it was IE7 that delivered the final killer blow to IE5. If IE8 can help speed IE6 towards the door, we will all be happier little web monkeys. Oh, happy day! Read the Features of IE8 Beta1 |
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