The Internet Explorer 8 beta aftermath

Yesterday at MIX08, the Internet Explorer team announced a whole slew of information about the upcoming version eight of IE.  We already knew that Microsoft had reversed their stance on defaulting to standards compliance mode, but this was the first instance of a complete list of features and fixes.  More than that, Microsoft took the next big step and released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 to the public.

And with that release, developers everywhere took advantage of the release to ferret out all the information they could find, run benchmarks, and try and ascertain Microsoft’s ultimate plans for IE8.  Below is an incomplete, but fairly comprehensive roundup of the best IE8 analysis from yesterday:

• Ars Technica takes their first look at Internet Explorer 8: Welcome to the ocho.
• John Resig of jQuery goes into detail on the new JavaScript support in IE8
• CSS3.info goes over the new CSS3 stuff in IE8, hint: there’s not much, just substring match selectors.
• Anne van Kestern highlights a few “bad things” that still remain or were added in IE8.
• Me.dium shows off new IE8 features - Ajaxian goes over the new “activities” feature in IE8
• Dion highlights features in IE8 that relate to Google Gears.
• Comet Daily talks about the connection limit being raised from 2 to 6, great news for AJAX and Comet applications.
• Marty Alchin talks about IE8 and upcoming standards support.