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Mary-Jo Foley
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Private IE 8 beta 1 test build coming soon

By | February 23, 2008, 10:57am PST

A number of Microsoft enthusiasts this week received invitations to a “limited technical beta program” for Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 1.

According to the invitation, Microsoft is planning to make IE 8 Beta 1 available to the general public, as well. But before that happens, an invitation-only tet program will be conducted. The invitation describes IE 8 Beta 1 being focused on developers.

(ActiveWin is running the full text of the note Microsoft sent to some IE 8 beta invitees this past week.)

Microsoft officials have said they plan to show off IE 8 at Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 conference in early March in Las Vegas. Officials also have said they are planning to add a developer-selectable “super-standards” mode to IE 8 that would enable the browser to qualify as more standards-compliant.

Microsoft still has not offered a final-delivery target date for IE 8.  Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006. Microsoft officials have said they are shooting to deliver more frequent, regular builds of IE.

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Topics

Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Invitation, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Disclosure

Mary-Jo Foley

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by/funded by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.

Biography

Mary-Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

Got a tip? Send her an email with your rants, rumors, tips and tattles. Confidentiality guaranteed.

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RE: Private IE 8 beta 1 test build coming soon
makrejktt5701-24353692035010016929936514811283 Updated - 11th Nov
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Even though I'm a Microsoft-enthusiasts, I'm not invited by Microsoft.
Grayson Peddie 23rd Feb 2008
However, I do love to test Internet Explorer 8 when it's available as a public beta.

I can't wait to get my hands in it.
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You should have asked Mikey about it...
nix_hed 25th Feb 2008
I'm sure he's running the pre-alpha with Windows 7 pre-alpha just fine.
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I feel cheated
Ole Man 23rd Feb 2008
They have deprived me of the chance to say
NO!
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I definitely want to give IE8 a try
quikboy 23rd Feb 2008
Chances are, MS understands that other browsers are slowly pulling more users to their side, because they technically are better.

So now MS has probably revamped IE with more features, extending it to more platforms, and making it actually better.

Can't wait to see it. I've got a feeling it will be something.
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I'll Try IE8
itanalyst 23rd Feb 2008
When Firefox goes away...

Which is never.
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Heard the same about Netscape
jackbond 24th Feb 2008
But good to see you're taking a "stand" against something truly evil. You probably spend an hour a day worrying about the next Microsoft conspiracy, but not a minute about global warming or something actually important or real. Get a life.
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Actually I Do
itanalyst 24th Feb 2008
Yesterday I planted a tree, kissed a baby, saved a baby seal...

Then I woke up.
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Puzzled
burningbird 24th Feb 2008
I looked for mention of global warming in Ms. Foley's original post and couldn't see anything. In fact, the post was on IE8. How surprising then to see a comment related to IE8. You were right to take this person to task for making a comment that's actually related to the topic of the post.

The nerve of some people.
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Why puzzled?
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 24th Feb 2008
We should all do our part to help public libraries!

TripleII
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Message has been deleted.
jackbond Updated - 25th Feb 2008
  • Flagged
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Message has been deleted.
jamesrayg Updated - 25th Feb 2008
  • Flagged
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******* sensorship
jackbond 25th Feb 2008
What the **** is the point of having forums if someone can't ******* point an offensive message? Is this site visited by ******* morons who are so easily offended by the ******* f word. What a ******* joke. Every one of the fire ******* fox morons messages are offensive, and yet they aren't deleted. This is America ********.
0 Votes
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wait...
evilkillerwhale@... 25th Feb 2008
You're saying Global Warming, the ludicrous idea that humans are severely affecting the temperature of the Earth is real?
I'll make three points on that, then go back to the tech points:
1: Mars is heating up at a similar rate (per distance from the sun) as Earth, and the sun has gotten hotter
2: Thermo readings for the Earth have only become reliable since the mid 70's, and at THAT time, they were touting global cooling. It was a big thing even in NewsWeek. As well as cities throw off average Earth temperature because they are hotter than humans should be. More people, doing hotter things, makes it *SEEM* to be hotter everywhere.
3: The polar ice caps, as well as greenland HAVE ACTUALLY GAINED ice in the past couple years. Al Gore's mockumentary got ripped to shreds even in the UK, and Europe is KNOWN for it's ridiculous liberalism on ridiculous ideas.

Back to tech:

Bill Gates forever was Microsoft. Bill Gates is more of a philanthropist that anyone else I know of. Microsoft hurt some start up companies. Yes. Given. Apple stole the idea for Macintosh from IBM and from Xerox. No one cares. They let them have it, and everyone benefitted. Apple stole the idea for the iBook/PowerBook/MacBook. I can't remember the original creations name, but since no one was seriously doing it they did. Microsoft is the same. No one had a cross platform media system that worked with everything, so they made one. No one had a cross system browser that came installed on most machines, so they made one. Microsoft brings technology to people who never get it, even if they have hurt some people along the way. Some of what they did is wrong. Yes. Fully understood. At the same time, show me a business that doesn't.
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And cigarettes don't cause cancer
jackbond 25th Feb 2008
I can only hope you are a heavy smoker, and your end is near.
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Message has been deleted.
Sluggo Fishmonger Updated - 28th Feb 2008
  • Flagged
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wait... ?
aussieblnd@... 26th Feb 2008
I see your med's are wearing off!
0 Votes
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Firefox is crap
Sluggo Fishmonger 25th Feb 2008
Firefox is a sluggish, bloated ram sucking pig. Watching a Youtube style flash video with FF and it pegs my duel 2.8 gig P4 HP.
0 Votes
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Firefox is crap
pipercub1941 25th Feb 2008
Get a life and clean out the crapware in your PC to improve performance. Or you could allways go with AMD Athlon 64X2 6400.
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Firefox is crap
sip@... 25th Feb 2008
IE is Crap
0 Votes
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well...
evilkillerwhale@... 25th Feb 2008
I almost exclusively use FF. But I often find pages that won't load correctly in FF, or that have compatibility issues. It gets better with every refresh, but oh well. IE is much more compatible, if slower, uglier, and all.
0 Votes
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because.....
scottyb37743_z 25th Feb 2009
with IE holding the dominant share of the browser market developers have to design websites that aren't standards compliant. Firefox was developed to render correctly. It's the websites you go to that don't!
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yeah...
evilkillerwhale@... 25th Feb 2008
because with AMD he could be almost as fast an intel.
0 Votes
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Now....
scottyb37743_z 25th Feb 2009
if you start keeping up with technology "news" (not the fairytales you're trying to pass off as fact) you would know AMD is the fastest CPU available. Granted, he's a moron for making the comment.
0 Votes
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That is funny.
Sluggo Fishmonger 25th Feb 2008
>>Get a life and clean out the crapware in your PC to improve performance

Geek please.

That reminds me of something I heard a long time ago.

"They are so stupid that they think we are stipid"


BTW It is a brand spanking new FF install (portible apps actually), w/no plugins on a clean, locked down, firewalled, tweaked XP install . I had 10-12 tabs open reading the blogs this morning and I closed all but one tab and FF was still holding on to 200+ megs of ram.


My development FF install, with Webdeveloper tool bar, Firebug and Google tool bar (nothing else) regularly hovers @ 300-400 megs and peaks out at 500 - 800 megs before I have to close it down.

IF I leave it open over the weekend it will suck up to 1.5 gigs on a 2 gig dell work station.
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Agreed
scottyb37743_z 25th Feb 2009
FF is a resource hog! I'll still use it over IE every time.
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somehow I doubt
Freebird54 25th Feb 2008
that your problem is with Firefox! Being as the scenario you mention (watching you-tube vids with Firefox) does *NOT* peg my 1 Ghz AMD (w/512 RAM). Have you cleaned your crapware lately? Were you running IE recently?

happy
0 Votes
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Firefox is crap available today
Ole Man 25th Feb 2008
If the "success" of Microsoft is any measure
of popularity, usability, or functionality,
then Firefox's success exceeds that of
Microsoft's by a factor of at least ten
zigabytes........
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....
evilkillerwhale@... 25th Feb 2008
Your message doesn't make sense... How do you multiply by a zigabyte? Since when is ziga a metric prefix?


Exa
Peta
Tera
Giga
Mega
Kilo
Hecto
Deca
Unit
deci
centi
milli
micro
nano
pico
femto
atto? (it starts with an a)



above and below are the xacto yacto and zacto or w/e. But above, I'm fairly certain isn't xiga, yiga, and ziga...

and is that 80 "ziga"bits?
0 Votes
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awesome
I_am_windex007@... 25th Feb 2008
Nice post. Should come in handy when I'm doing Pm/?s to furlong/fortnight conversions.

As for FF vs IE, I'll say I'm a bigger fan of FF. As a web developer, it is a source of constant frustration to try to achieve consistnecy between browsers. It seems that the general series of events is to create a working page in FF, and then to go through it all again to fix it to work in IE, by using IE's own standards (Clearly they know better than W3C), or by abusing bugs in the browser itself to achieve the desired result. A waste of time, and a headache, either way.

I'm looking forward, though, to the possibility of IE8 actually being standards complient... so that they can be more fairly compared to eachother... and be judged based on efficiency, features, and ease of use as opposed to which will properly display web content.

That's my two cents anyways.

oh... and, one more thing. To the guy who's Firefox is gobbling up... a few hundred MB of RAM with one tab open: This is not normal behavior. Something isn't working correctly. I'm not sure how you could rationaly believe this to be expected or tolerated by the internet-savvy using FF.
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If FF is your benchmark
Sluggo Fishmonger 25th Feb 2008
That is really sad.

I am partial to Apache, Tomcat, Flex and The Ramones.

Not in that order though.
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Benchmark..... smenchmark.......
Ole Man 25th Feb 2008
Just a simple comparison. You got the idea.

When it comes to crap, Firefox can't hold a
candle to IE.
0 Votes
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really?
Sluggo Fishmonger 25th Feb 2008
>>You got the idea.

No, I am obviously stupid.

So, how would you respond to this?

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=44766&messageID=827719&start=-9971
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Maybe you are clueless?
Tiggster 26th Feb 2008
Ummm.. Since Firefox is by far the second most widely used browser around, I think you must have something far worse wrong with your machine than Firefox. Perhaps you don't know how to keep your system secure and it is infected? Or maybe you are being dishonest? These are by far the two most likely scenarios.
0 Votes
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Yes it MUST be me or my machine
Duke E. Love 26th Feb 2008
Because nobody, and I do me NOBODY, has EVER had an issue with memory leaks with FF

http://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+memory+leak+&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS209US209&aq=t

And from mozillazine.org:

"For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem. This article discusses how to lower Firefox's memory consumption.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

Nope... it is me.
0 Votes
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ie8
puppadave 25th Feb 2008
o.k. boys and girls.. cant wait until the first test results are in and the crying starts...just as I could not wait to get "7" off my personal machines at home....Hope the test results are "un-screened" this time and the pro & con issues are reported in BREIF posts.. Wait and see...Sleep well
puppadave
0 Votes
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I Love you, I LOVE is... an emergency cure for VTNCP > I'm shaking I can't:
rtirman37@... 25th Feb 2008
My XP SP2 Zulu Delta-install Computer can strike the flame of a propane lighter; and snap the cover back in place. i am completely at a loss for any future Cebit experience with the Vista operating system. I would need one of those MSAA Red Books with DOS Environments to pull anything out of this software, I like it this way. But, the shop rates might be higher than one of those $100 laptops in the White Pages to be plugged into the MCP at Microsoft's Resort Island.

Yea, Internet Explorer 8, EAX; next sighting I'll make a short list of compatability issues with other software venders WMI. Whatever tha managment term is? I don't think they work that's a computer's job.
0 Votes
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Another attempt to jam stuff down user's throats...
mikifinaz1@... 25th Feb 2008
I just want a browser that works and isn't a security sieve without all the crap like silverlight or should I say silvercuffs.
0 Votes
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For Vista *and* XP?
woot@... 25th Feb 2008
Just curious; will IE8 be available for both XP and Vista, or will it be Vista only? At what point will MS stop offering new versions of IE, like they did on Win 2K?
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I'll bet IE8 will be bundled with Live, Spaces and lot's of other junk
jimm44444y@... 26th Feb 2008
Let's hope Google will arrange a Google-OS based on Linux with availability for online translation of Linux to all languages in the World, like Wikipedia and Google have done with Gmail and Google itself.

Think about it. A good stable computer with Linux system, firefox, Open Office with Google Docs function to save or share documents online.

I want to see my next computer with a Google-key instead of Windows-key.

Microsoft is dead.
0 Votes
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yeah
jimm44444y@... 26th Feb 2008
yeah. firefox use RAM. OPERA BROWSER IS 10 000 000 TIMES BETTER!!
0 Votes
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re
jimk_z 26th Feb 2008
Have high hopes. I love Firefox but it is slow and still not memory efficient. I'll still probably use both since Firefox has the excellent Firebug and other plug-ins.
0 Votes
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I use Firefox on 8 different computers
Ole Man 1st Mar 2008
Nooooooo problema!!!

Could I be a genius? That's not what I'm
told by the Micro-luvvers here.........
0 Votes
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RE: Private IE 8 beta 1 test build coming soon
jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812 10th Oct
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0 Votes
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RE: Private IE 8 beta 1 test build coming soon
makrejktt5701-24353692035010016929936514811283 Updated - 11th Nov
Cleaning it once a to rss in relation to your feed , yet unfortunately acquired a matter introducing the application reebok jersey that will help bing aaron rodgers jersey or google clay matthews jersey most suitable ascension

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