MIX08 in Las Vegas

Once again the MIX conference is being arranged at the Venetian in Las Vegas, just as last year. One of the most interesting announcements this far is the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1. Judging from the distance in time between IE6 and IE7, this is a big step forward.

First and foremost, it runs standards mode as default, which is kind of cool since they changed their mind about this issue only a few days ago.

The CSS implementation has received a bit of love lately and their goal seems to be to deliver support for CSS 2.1, as well as a few goodies from CSS 3.

The beta also has a debug module similar to the popular extension Firebug available in Firefox.

The Venetian in Las Vegas.

My colleague Roger found some errors, but it’s only a beta version after all and the development team says they’re not ready with the CSS 2.1 implementation yet.

This release arrived much sooner than I anticipated, and in combination with the already infamous 180 turn to standards mode, Microsoft might be on the right track.