IE IMO is the best version of IE but does that mean its better than the competition? hmm no... Its still playing catch up.
Yeah, as a rule, I don't bother with beta software. I've been using IE8 for a couple of weeks now and no problems thus far.
I'm totally addicted to Chrome. I know it has some bugs, and Firefox is better in so many ways, but - The screen space you get back! And the ram difference! Internet explorer looks like it was made by Fisher Price...
Firefox has been driving me nuts lately. Switched back to IE about 2 weeks ago... IE8. It's alright. Firefox is just a memory hog, even with 4gb ram.
I have never used IE 8.0 only IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0 and 5.0. All I can say was IE 7.0 is doing great compare to the old version. But I was using fire fox more.