As long as I was at sites that presented no problems (more on this in a second), browsing was fairly speedy—commendable for a beta 1! But certain major sites produced major problems and took an inordinately long time to load. My Yahoo! was a notable member of this class. In addition to the performance issue, my wood-grain background to this portal didn't display properly, and IE8 could not retrieve the calendar drop-down from the Personal Assistant area. Adding injury to insult, the beta IE8 took over 90 percent of my CPU activity when on this site. Oddly, it seems that compliance with Web standards was to blame: When I switched to IE7 Compatibility mode, all these problems went away.

Other sites, such as PCMag.com, CNN, eBay, and The New York Times, had no particular speed issues with the beta browser in its new rendering mode. The beta even worked with the fussy Citibank Web site, but it did generate an "unsupported browser error" when I tried logging in to the Fidelity financial site.

Thankfully, IE8 restores your last session if your session closes abnormally—read crashes—with its new Automatic Crash Recovery feature. Unfortunately, this feature didn't show up after every crash I experienced. At some points, it used over 95 percent of my CPU power as shown in Windows Task Manager. The IE development team has implemented new mechanisms for dealing with feedback from testers and bug reports. There's actually a system for beta testers to vote on which bugs are most critical, and a "Report a webpage" feature for sites that don't render correctly.

On browser speed measures, like the Celtic Kane JavaScript benchmark test and QuirksMode.org' s W3C DOM tests, the IE8 beta 1 held its own. In QuirksMode.org' s W3C DOM 1 test, I got an average result of 460 ms over ten runs, only slightly worse than Firefox 2's 366, but much better than IE7's 2,433. On Celtic Kane, my result was 3,004 ms, compared with 3,604 ms for Firefox. Safari and Opera still own this test, however, with 500 ms and 711 ms, respectively.

In memory usage, IE8 was right on a par with the current released version of Firefox. With the same three sites loaded, it used 50MB, while Firefox 2 used 51MB. Start-up time isn't a problem for the new browser, either; a warm restart took under 2 seconds and a cold start after a reboot required less than 5 seconds. This is far better than the Firefox 3 beta did.