As we alluded to in this piece earlier in the week, it looked like we were going to get a significant preview of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 today.
What we got, in fact, was an early public developer release of IE8 Beta 1 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta.
With all of the public speculation and interest and Microsoft's recent announcement that the browser has been changed to better adhere to current standards, the company, in a somewhat unprecedented move, put IE8 Beta 1 online and available to the general public.
The usual disclaimer. The is a very early Beta. Don't try it on a mission-critical machine or your main computer.
Update 2 March 5, 2008 PM
Our first tests of the IE8 beta immediately reflected the the Acid 2 compatibility problem documented here. We also noted some conflicts with other Microsoft betas loaded on the same machine. Once the others were offloaded, we found it interesting that StumbleUpon integration was right there on the intro page. (Look out StumbleUpon. Microsoft's watchin' you! :)
There are now numerous online publications (many more than we expected) reviewing the initial release of both IE8 Beta 1 and Silverlight 2 Beta 1, which was also released today.
Rather than duplicate those efforts here, you can check out a variety of online reviews at the TechMeMe archived page here. Be sure to check out the great piece at Read / Write Web.
As always, we'll keep you informed as to our findings after a thorough test drive of the Beta (s).