I think Microsoft did a good thing making the IE8 beta public, I know they say its a dev release but hopefully it will do two important things close to my heart;
Firstly, and most importantly, help ISV’s and developers focus on writing a single standards compliant code base for web apps and banish all the ‘#if def’ scenarios for all the various browser quirks that look great on the quirky browser but throw the rest for six.
Secondly, and nearly as important, banish IE6 from the face of the earth. This is the worst affliction out in the wild with its appauling standards support and even worse CSS rendering performance. The sooner IE6 is a distant memory the better.
One very cool thing I want to mention about IE8 is the support for web slices; this is where you can hot link to a small part of a web page and see it on demand without having to reload the site. Check it out.
Anyway, get IE8 beta 1 here … http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx
