Internet Explorer 8 Beta: Are these people for real?

An e-mail from MSDN says:

Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of "write once, run anywhere", freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we’ve provided a meta-tag which can be added on a per-page or per-site level which will instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes. We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers. To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120024.

So I followed the link and ended up reading this rubbish:

Some Web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8. This problem does not occur in earlier versions of Internet Explorer, and the affected Web sites continue to be displayed correctly and to work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 7. For example, you may experience any of the following symptoms in Internet Explorer 8:

• Menus, images, or text are in the wrong positions on some Web sites.
• Some Web site features do not work.
• You receive script error messages on some Web sites.
• Internet Explorer stops responding or stops working on some Web sites.

Ha ha ha! Ladies and gentlemen, so *that's* how you win the browser war! Jesus!
Recommended Books on Usability write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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