IE8 Beta 2 has now been released  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/intern … orer/beta/
As much as we dont like IE it is the most popular browser .

One interesting piece of info is to force ie 8 to render sites as ie7 does

Update your site to render in IE7 Mode

You may experience one of the following issues when you use the Beta 2 version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8:

    * Misaligned webpage layout
    * Overlapping text or images
    * JavaScript functionality issues and errors

These issues may occur because Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 displays webpages using its latest "Standards mode" by default, whereas most current webpages are created and tested to work with Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode.

Getting Internet Explorer 8 to always render a site or page like Internet Explorer 7 can be done by simply adding a tag. No additional changes are required.

There are two options for doing this:

   1. On a per-site basis
      The site owner can add the HTTP header:

      X-UA-Compatible:IE=EmulateIE7
   2. On a per-page basis
      The site owner can add a special HTML tag to each document, right after the tag:

      <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"/>

The META tag retains Internet Explorer 7 rendering behavior while still accessing all Internet Explorer 8 has to offer. This allows your site visitors who are using Internet Explorer 8 a seamless experience while you work behind the scenes to update your web properties. When your site is updated to render in Internet Explorer 8, you can remove the tag or continue to leverage the tag functionality, as it will remain as part of Internet Explorer 8 upon final release.

Downloading now so will let you know how I get on

Thanks for posting that.

I wonder what kind of "latest standards" it is deploying...hopefully w3c standards.

While one of main goals for Internet Explorer 8 is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also forward-looking towards CSS3. CSS3 is the next step in the evolution of Cascading Style Sheets, and unlike CSS 2.1 which consists of one single document, the CSS3 specification is broken down into different modules in order to speed up the process of converging on clear specifications and implementations of different features. Additionally, CSS3 hopes to further clarify some of the ambiguities in the CSS 2.1 specification while providing new features to web authors. Internet Explorer 8 hopes to implement some of the most requested CSS3 features by web developers and designers

HTML Improvements
The new HTML 4.01 implementation is now much more interoperable. The improvements include:

The object tag image fallback is interoperable with other browsers. For example, an object tag without dimensions is now the same size as the image, instead of 0 x 0 pixels.
The button element submits its value attribute instead of its innerHTML, which means you can use the button element for cross-browser FORM scenarios.
The getElementById method is now case-sensitive, and it no longer incorrectly performs searches using the NAME attribute.
The setAttribute method is now case-insensitive; you do not need to use "camel case" (for example, "camelCaseWord") to specify attributes. It also correctly identifies HTML attributes such as CLASS and FOR.

Do they fix the multiple tabs on IE8? My observation to IE7, yes there is a multiple tab but when you click the link that needs to open a window, Firefox automatically generate a tab for the link you clicked but in IE7 - generate another window and that's not user-friendly.

there is much greater functionality for the tabs . if you open a new tab from an existing page they become colour coded creating groups . If you just open a new options are avaiable such as previuos pages from the current session

If you click on the main link that I provided all the answers are there

allenion wrote:

there is much greater functionality for the tabs . if you open a new tab from an existing page they become colour coded creating groups . If you just open a new options are avaiable such as previuos pages from the current session

If you click on the main link that I provided all the answers are there

That's very handy!

I have genuine microsoft windows XP, will it be free for me?

cipher wrote:

I have genuine microsoft windows XP, will it be free for me?

Yes

cipher wrote:

I have genuine microsoft windows XP, will it be free for me?

Gen... U... wine...
Fancy stuff 

I havent even evolved to IE7, i only just installed ff3 Being a 22 year old stuck in the past sure is novel

I remember trying IE8B1 and found that none of my sites worked unless I emulated IE7 - the main problem being that it failed to recognise stylesheets included using

<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='styles.css' />

have they fixed this yet?

the short answer is no - well maybe a bit !!!

so far if this is close to the finished article then we will all be putting in a lot of work or adding the tags to force ie to read as ie7. I havent had a chance to remove some of current fixes that are needed for ie7 to see if the pages then load ok in ie8 . Perhaps that is the answer

This beta is still quite unstables so I must confess I do get board having to reload and the other main problem is that i fing it is essential when viewing pages that you unfamiliar with to view as ie8 then emulated IE7 to check to see if content is missing

given up crashed for ****** time this morning deleted will wait until it works