Internet Explorer 8 beta now released to public

The first beta was only for developers, but after a number of updates and fixes, Microsoft is opening this new version to anyone.  So far it's looking quite good; stable and noticeably faster in many tasks than IE7, which is looking more than a little dated compared to the recently released Firefox 3.0. At first glance, IE8 doesn't look that much different, but does include a number of tweaks and updates, including:

• Private Browsing - Curious about the darker sides of the 'Net? Don't worry, most of us are, and IE8 is the first browser to realize this, giving you a mode called "InPrivate" that doesn't track where you go in your history, doesn't keep cookies, and doesn't store auto-complete information.
• Accelerators - Highlight a word, and IE8 will display a button that will let you define it through Encarta. Highlight a street address, and you'll see an option to display the address on a map. Highlight words in a foreign language, and you can see a quick translation. There are lots of little context options like this, called accelerators, because they speed up the process of copying a line of text, opening a new browser window, and pasting it in somewhere to look it up.
• Visual Search - This is another area where sites will be able to insert themselves into your browser. Here you can define visual searches for things like eBay, enabling you to start typing your search into the IE8 search box and immediately get results and pictures from listings right through the browser. You can then click directly on what you want. There are visual searches available for other sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and naturally, Google.
  

There are dozens of other updates, including stability and compatibility, which should make IE8 an excellent choice for someone looking for an alternative to Firefox.

 

I have this installed on a test computer and it seems pretty stable so far.

 

Remeber it's beta, so if you put this on your main computer and it crashes oh well. 

 

Here is the download.

Downloading the new google browser now, Tux. Called Google Chrome. I've seen a bit of the stuff on my co-worker's PC. Gmail loads a whole lot faster. IE 8 is basically IE 7.1, not enough stuff to warrant a new major release.

 

I'll keep you posted as to what I see after I have played with it a bit.

OK, one thing that is very cool as someone interested in software development. They have a tool they call Task Manager that when you open it shows you how much CPU is being used by all the components on a web page. Very cool. HTML5 not supported yet but it is coming in a future release. It's fast loading up JS that's for sure.

For some reason, Chrome doesn't like to login to Covers tonight - probably because of account re-direction or cookies. I did logon earlier tonight with it. But so far so good otherwise, I like it alot. Buh bye IE for me.

I have been taking it around the block.  There are a number of sites that are going to need some code re-writing

For sure Lippsman. All this change keeps me and tons of other web developers employed

 

Scores seemed to load quickly for me with it though. I've found that across the sites that I know use alot of js, etc., Chrome seems to load them pretty fast. It's going to be interesting to see how they pick away at IE's numbers. Not even worth it to mention Firefox anymore. I think people like me who use FF, once we see Chrome, we won't go back. Although I won't ditch FF until Chrome gets patched with a fix to let me log onto Covers

OK, THIS is cool:

 

One thing it's missing that I like in IE and FF is in the URL box, the down arrow that quickly shows you your last sites. But the speed more than makes up for it.

And I don't like this at all:

 

All I know is could there be more Chrome overkill on tech blogs and sites than there's been the past couple days.  Does a site need every writer to write a blog on Chrome?  I guess editors don't work anymore.