IE8 Beta1 Launched

Firefox is working fantastic for me. The new Beta is great.

In IE of old I used to be able to have a bar across the top with the file menu and back arrows, home, stop, reload and an address line.
Now I have three bars. An address bar, a file menue bar, and a tab. IE of old would let me stretch, or thin them out and move them around. Gone!
I purchased a 21 inch display for me, not for MS.

Firefox I have a file menu bar with navigation buttons and a address bar in it. One line! Not another 1/2 inch of real-estate.Not an additional navigation or address bar.
A screen shot of IE with one bar across the top with navigation buttons (no text), address entry, and file commands would surprise me.

Yeah, that's something I reall miss. A thin bar across the top that does everything I want, not a fat one that does whatever some programmer at Microsoft thinks I want.

I dislike the fact that I can't put everything on the same line if I want to. Sure, maybe that doesn't give me lots of space for tabs, but if that's what I want, that's what I want and I want that more than I wanted tabbed browsing. But some guy at Microsoft throught that everyone would want tabs soo badly that they'd be willing to dedicate three times the screen space to a redesign to support it. Bah!

Firefox is also my favorite browser. Stopped using IE about 4-5 years ago. Although I'm on it now because I'm on a new computer and am waiting for FF3 to get out of beta. Yes yes I can use FF2 but I'm too lazy to set it up and then set up 3.

I've also used Opera but found it to lag on certain pages that uses heavy scripts or java, not too sure. Firefox and IE did not have the issue and more sites work with firefox than opera.

Opera is probably more customizeable than firefox if you're not afraid to edit files. However I prefer FF because its basic until you add the extensions you want. My FF was customized to only have an address bar, tabs bar if I'm on more than 1 site, and a 1 button menu next to the address bar. Also the status bar. No buttons or anything else. Used mouse gestures to navigate or keyboard shortcuts. It was customized to be minimalist and functional. Added a search extension where I'd just have to type g "search text" and it would search google. Added as many search engines with those shortcuts as I wanted. Way more efficient than clicking the search bar and selecting a search engine.

Anyway, IE8 looks more or less the same as IE7 which I don't like but I prefer it over 6 for tabs. Lack of customizeability, brings nothing that I want that other browsers can, ugly. In other words, its not for me.

I don't even use IE. I will stick with my Firefox which I have grown to love and adore.

If you want to play with IE8 but don't want to install it, you can download a virtual hard drive with IE8 loaded from Microsoft (IE8_VPC.EXE). You'll need Virtual PC 2007 as well if you don't have it already.

(Virtual machines are also useful for visiting websites that you don't want to leave any trace of on your machine, if you get my drift)

Thanks pdeprez

i've found its ok as long as you don't right click on anything.......... Popup's also seem to confuse it... Oh and highlight, it doesn't like that either. So as long as you don't do anything unexpected like drag your curser across the screen it works great.

The opposite of computing ain't it? Thought the computer is suppose to handle what I unexpectedly do

Hehe,

I've actually had to completely remove it, it crashed way to frequently when rendering pages, especially when a flash movie was embeded. Although it has adopted a firefox "Restore previous session" function, I think i'll wait to the general release before i try it again.