I have been playing with IE8 tonight. And I have to say that I am very impressed with what microsoft has done. They seem to be serious about a standards compliant browser this time (bugs not withstanding, but its beta 1, so they get a pass).
They fixed the 2 domain thing, and added some cool features that I hope other browsers pick up soon (XDR: cross domain request!). Better browser history control, and actually best of all they added two new features that the old microsoft would have crippled: Slices and activities. Slices allows developers to add modules that can be pulled off (a bit like dashboard), except the slices are defined by the developer. The bad old microsoft would have made this some horrid non-standard thing that required active x. The new, kinder MS has decided to go with a MICROFORMAT. A completely standards compliant microformat. The kind of microformat anyone will be able to parse. If I felt like it I could probably whip up support for webslices in firefox tonight, its that simple. And it won’t break on other browsers because its just done with html classnames.
Well done Microsoft, I hope this is a sign of things to come. (but silverlight? really? come on!)