Lukewarm reaction to first IE8 beta
 

Yesterday at the MIX '08 session, Microsoft employees Ray Ozzie, Dean Hachamovitch and a host of Microsoft partners touted the new Silverlight and IE8 betas to what could be seen (from my perspective) as a lukewarm reception from the attending crowd, despite the non apparent excitement from the IT staff at Aston Martin showing off how they now are able to sell cars to potential buyers, and the Hard Rock Cafe before them, showing off their immense collection of celebrity memorabilia using the Silverlight technology; even if the latter preferred to use the Firefox browser in doing so!

Neowin members were among the first that were able to download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, because we had already posted the page where the download links were, but up until noon yesterday, remained inactive until the first MIX '08 keynote was drawing to a close.

One Neowin member said "I can’t even edit my own posts on this. I have to create a new post." while another noted "Is not bad, I like what I see by now... Live Hotmail doesn't work for me with IE8 but I can get it work with Emulate IE7 button". It does seem strange that Hotmail doesn't work in "IE8 mode", another Neowin member, Brandon Live, reminded beta users: "Remember, this release is targetted [sic] at web developers. There are a few other nice new user-facing features (crash recovery, and not having to open new windows for Protected Mode IE to be on/off for different tabs, etc), but this is far from the complete IE 8 experience". View the whole discussion thread here.

What is your experience with IE8, did you go back to IE7 or another browser? We'd be interested to hear your comments.

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