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Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released yesterday.

I've been a fan of Firefox for years, and nowadays I only use IE when I have to (i.e. when someone's web site only works in IE), but I still keep track of what they're doing and of course I'm into anything with "beta" written on it.

Beta 1 was a bit of a disappointment because it was a lot slower than IE7 and had a lot of rendering problems on sites I use regularly.

Beta 2 is faster and has less rendering problems than beta 1, but it's still not release quality.

What I really like about beta 2 are the features they've added to keep pace with Firefox:

• Smart Address Bar - so far it seems basically the same as Firefox 3's smart bar (and there's nothing wrong with that)
• Favorites Bar -seems a bit smarter than any of Firefox's bars, not sure how much I'd use the cleverness though
• New Tab Page -Mozilla are only at the Labs stage with coming up with this type of feature
• Tab Grouping -I think there's a Firefox extension that does this - meh
• Find on Page -as of Firefox v1...

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