Browsersphere

Nearly two months after the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, several people have had a chance to test the browser out and formulate their first, second and even third impressions.  I’ve listed some of those impressions below, in no particular order:

• Ian Tearle was frustrated by a seemingly unremovable home page.
• Gary James decided after three minutes that IE8 doesn’t suck any less than IE7.
• Rob Hensing reveals that IE8 will likely opt-in to DEP in Vista thanks to Vista SP1 (more on that here as well).
• Matt Hester has put up two screencasts, one of which touches on CSS development and HTML 5 features, and the other of which takes a look at Activities and Webslices.
• IETester is “a free WebBrowser [sic] that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process” (via milosradovic).
• Here’s an IE8 review from Redmond magazine (consider the source) that says IE8 “shows promise.”
• Edward Mendelson gives a look at “the next browser war,” including an overview of some of the features unique to IE8.
• PctipsBox explains how to speed up Internet Explorer 8 by increasing the connections limit.
• Check out a presentation on some of the garbage collection improvements made in IE8’s handling of JScript (via dzone).
• Tim Kadlec comments on the availability of the W3C Selectors API in IE8.
• A Web User Interface Designer and Architect on LinkedIn asked how important supporting IE6 is in a world in which IE7 and IE8 also exist (and received some pretty good answers).
• Here’s a look at The Future AJAX Wrapper, given IE8’s non-standard XDomainRequest feature.
• Apparently ordered lists aren’t quite ordered in IE8 (via Digg).
• The slightest hint of some sort of Facebook integration in IE8 sent one user running for the hills.
• Marlon Ribunal gives a decent overview of his impressions of IE8, including some screenshots of its developer tools in action.
• IE8 Beta 1 doesn’t quite seem to stack up against Firefox 3 Beta 5 in terms of JavaScript performance (at least according to one particular speed test).
• A post at Softpedia explains why some JavaScript issues in IE8 Beta1 have caused certain fixes to look as if they’ve failed, and also mentions that IE8 Beta 2 is scheduled to drop this summer.

If you’ve had a chance to play around with IE8 Beta 1, what are your impressions?

Tags: Beta, Internet Explorer, Opinion, Reviews, Web Standards