Wow... that was quick... IE8 beta 1 hits the web.

A nice surprise just hit my feed reader. Microsoft has just released the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, a micro-site containing download links for IE8 beta 1 as well as useful information for web developers.

I'm not sure, but I think I'm actually getting really excited about this release. While I haven't installed the beta yet (I'm working on something at the moment, and I know that it's going to want to make me restart Windows, and that would totally kill me groove :) ), the features listed on the site look great. I'm especially looking forward to experimenting with the new Ajax navigation options which enables the back/forward buttons through use of the window.location.hash (as I'd always thought it should).

Firefox is still my browser of choice, however Firefox's stupid crashes, crappy scrolling performance (especially on pages with lots of Flash) and gargantuan memory consumption (eg. this current firefox.exe process is taking up over 400MB) is starting to annoy me. If IE8 had a flexible addon/extension api, I think there would be a tougher decision to be made.