Antix Software Limited

Beta 1 of IE8 is out.

My initial reaction to the news was that web developers will have another browser to support and if I install it on my development machine I will not be able to test on IE7 any more.

Supporting the different browsers over the years has been the biggest pain in the arse for web developers. Lately things have been getting better with more browsers following web standards, with the notable exception of IE6. IE7 is a lot better, but still has its difficulties, and IE8 promises to be fully standards complient so perhaps we wont need an ie8 stylesheet referenced in our sites... we'll see.

When IE7 arrived, I eagerly installed and soon realised that I couldn't see how my sites were rendered by IE6, and as 25% of people are still running on this browser, it was a big problem. The solution here was to run a virtual machine with XP and IE6. So will IE8 mean the same thing? Well apparently not, IE8 can render using a number of layout engines one of which is the IE7 emulator.

There is also new developer support, like we've had in Firefox for a while, but I'm very glad to see this included.

Anyhoo, not wanting to change my must have latest thing habit, I'm off to install IE8 beta and spend the rest of my year regretting it.