I had been poking around the IE site for a couple of days and thought to myself this morning, I'm gonna install the beta, see if it's as good as it sounds. So, I installed IE8 beta 1 today. Had a brief look about, couple of interesting additions, not least of which is the new developer tools which would be helpfull if I didn't already have the web developer tool bar and firebug on firefox. There's the usual "lets add some web 2.0/social networking integration" which frankly, is handled on a much bigger and better scale by the flock browser or any number of browser plugins for firefox, but hey...this is IE and not a browser that I will personally use for much more than testing of client websites. My use of IE to date has been for that single purpose only, like a lot of others, I gave up using IE for general browsing with the invention of firefox some years ago. So...I found a little issue, this issue is probably only relevant to others who build and test websites on multiple versions of IE. I have a number of browsers installed, namely Firefox, Opera, IE6 and IE7 (this covers a broad enough base on my development machine to get by) and today, as I said, I installed the IE8 beta which promptly overwrote my IE7 install...no problem, I know that there's an "emulate IE7" button in there so I can switch between the new rendering engine and the IE7 engine...but then I tried opening my standalone IE6 browser and to my disgust, it wouldn't display any web pages...ok, I need a working IE6, so what to do, after poking about a bit more, I found (in the developer tools) an option to view the page you're looking at in not just the 2 modes I knew about but also in an additional "quirks mode" which emulates IE 5.5....erm...ok...where's the IE6 option? surely if they've gone to all this effort, they'd add "view as IE6"....apparently not....taking a quick gander over at the browser statistics chart to see if I was missing something, I realised that the only thing I was missing was firefox's growth...I mean wow! but anyway...like I thought, IE5.5 has a very small(1.5%) share of the market whereas IE6 is still up in the top 2(after firefox, much to my surprise!) so when creating "developer tools" and "view options", I would have thought that a view as IE6 option would have been pretty high on the agenda...maybe it's coming in a future release, that would allow me to stop using my standalone IE6 and run IE8, as it stands at this point in time, IE8 has been uninstalled and IE7 restored...poor show, although like I said, this will only be an irritation to people who build and test websites.