I took the liberty to unlock this thread to point out a few things. Indeed, IE8 is out, and against all predictions, it looks rather good.
Problem is, not good enough.
- Chrome still leads in the UI organization department -- having the tabs at the top of everything else makes much more sense than having them at content level, and seeing everything over them (address bar, etc.) magically change as you switch from tab to tab. IE loses here, as well as Fx. You CAN make Fx behave like this with an extension, though, giving it extra points over IE.
- IE8 now has tab "grouping" by use of tab coloring. I dunno you people, but I find that feature to be completely useless. Tabs are isolated entities, why the [tornado fang] would I want to group them?
- Included porn mode (i.e. no traces of pages you view while in InPrivate Browsing mode). Chrome has had this since day one, Fx has had this for YEARS (through the use of extensions, admittedly, but Fx wouldn't be a fraction of what it is without the extensions).
- Third-party additions to the browser are even scarcer than before (considering there WERE a couple of addons for IE that were admittedly decent) because the implementation model has changed from IE7, which used the same addon framework as IE6. Some of them work as part of their legacy support, but possibilities of something breaking are higher than those of water being wet.
- Reportedly, it's faster than both Chrome, Fx and Opera. Mind you, these are in-house tests, probably made with pages made to work specifically with all the bullshit IE's rendering engine has done ever since it started. We'll talk when you have a decent userbase, Microsoft.
- Tab processes are isolated from each other, akin to Chrome. This is a step in the right direction; if one tab crashes, it won't take the entire window down with it. Fx will have to rework its development model to adapt to this, because when one of its tabs crashes, since the software is written as a single-process entity, the entire application goes down (all windows of it). One plus point for MS over Fx and Opera.
Can't think of any other stuff right now. When I install it locally and test it out I'll make sure to post any updates and stuff I find.