IE8 beta 2 is out

[stever]

http://digg.com/microsoft/IE8_Beta_2_is_out/

Please Digg it!

[Animal]

Been using it for a while. Halleluia, it has a built-in debugger! Not as good as Firebug because you can't just right click on the document and drill to the DOM, but it's a start!

[stever]

Built-in is nice! Easier to setup than Visual Studio Express Web.

Ext + Standards Mode + IE8 = Ick. Luckily, you can set <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> and have things work in the IE7 way.

[SeaSharp2]

Is the IE dev team still tinkering at the edges of the aging page rendering core or did they bite the bullet for this release?

[stever]

If bite the bullet means starting from scratch, then no. Doing that killed Netscape. Too big to start from scratch, and too many corporate policies and dependancies to deal with. But they do have a (mostly) full staffed team now. I have great hopes for IE9. ;)

[SeaSharp2]

If bite the bullet means starting from scratch, then no.
Well not a complete rewrite but it would be comforting to hear that Microsoft employs more than a couple of developers who can touch the code.

I listened to a Channel9 interview last year where the head technical brain for the html page rendering engine said the team approached the MS top brass 5 or more years ago and claimed the IE rendering code needed a complete rework. It does not sound as though that codebase has moved on much.

[alloftheabove]

I'm glad that there's a rendering switch built in. I wonder if css3 is going to be more supported in the future versions of major internet browsers. Too bad most of css3 isn't even in candidate recommendation. In fact, it's sad that it takes so long to get new stuff out. :-?

Hey, why don't the smilies stay animated?/:)

EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, IE is sort of behind the times isn't it?

[stever]

I listened to a Channel9 interview last year where the head technical brain for the html page rendering engine said the team approached the MS top brass 5 or more years ago and claimed the IE rendering code needed a complete rework. It does not sound as though that codebase has moved on much.

Some years ago, they had like three people. Now it is more like 100+. I imagine the codebase has moved on quite a bit, but it did have an old tired starting point. Hopefully their team is double what they say so they can have a team working on bigger changes for IE9. I suspect the Silverlight team is their outside-the-box team for that. They can bring JIT to JScript in the browser and provide an similar thing to Firefox's Extenstions for IE.