More trouble for Firefox as IE 8.0 in beta

IE 8.0 beta looks pretty sweet from what I’ve seen. Last week, I reported that FireFox 3.0 really sucks, and now Microsoft have added to their woes.

Here is the bad news for FF:

• A new standards mode:
  

  “The brand-new implementation of Standards mode in Internet Explorer 8 offers the best viewing experience of web pages created according to the latest web standards.”

• There are CSS improvements, support for data URIs, AJAX enhancements and support for DOM storage.
• There’s a new tool for developers that includes a DOM inspector, a JavaScript profiler, a color picker and ruler, options to outline objects, disable CSS and validate web pages. For me, this is the #1 reason why I still (occasionally) use FireFox.
• Inline search: now you can search inside a page from an elegant bar similar to the one from Safari. (This is MAJOR issue for me. Currently in IE, searching in page can be QUITE painful, IE attempts to search the page after each keystroke. So if you are in a very long document and you want to search for “stupid” when you type the first letter ’s’ it starts parsing the document looking for s’s. This usually results in me having to terminate the stupid thing.)
• Notepad wasn’t the best software for viewing the source code of a page, so IE8 includes a simple text viewer with syntax highlighting. Too bad that you can’t view the source code for selections.
• “InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no evidence of your browsing or search history.”

All in all, real new features, FireFox when is 4.0 coming??