To those of you who were unfortunate enough to receive one of the millions of emails "I" sent out last night ... yeah, sorry about that. As you might have guessed, I am not interested in selling you replica watches, Russian brides, various sexual enhancing products, cut-price versions of popular software or crediting you with my late-husband-who-just-so-happened-to-be-the-president-of-Nigeria's secret millions (sorry). Despite having an SPF record on my server, some spammer thought they would send a load of emails in my name and email address (but not from my server - the SPF should have blocked anything that doesn't come from my server but it didn't. Ho hum), with the result that I am now blocked from writing to many of the major email providers. Blah. Thanks a lot, spammers. *Grumble*

So, the first beta of IE8 is out... Looks no different to IE7 but apparently it passed the acid test and it's standards compliant!1!11 WOW!!1! So obviously I had to try it and review it just like I did for IE7.

Well first of all I can't spot any of the old CSS bugs (OMG I can't have been looking properly, seriously) but there are a few general bugs. If you view this site in it, the title of the page or blog entry kind of jumps when you hover over the navigation. Also, dropdown menus can't seem to decide whether they are as wide as the text inside them or as wide as the CSS says they should be. It seems if you click the menu, it is the correct width (i.e. that of the CSS) but if you click inside another field, it goes back to the width of the text inside.

Other than that, I couldn't find anything majorly wrong. I highly doubt I tested it fully, but still: could this be the end of IE hacks and having to make a separate stylesheet for IE because it interprets everything differently? Well, that certainly seems like an exciting prospect. The only thing I wonder is why Microsoft haven't done it before now.

Oh, and it has a handy "emulate IE7" button which is good only really for cross-browser checking... Can't easily install more than one IE on a computer so that's kind of useful. :P