Oh hey Coriander, FireFox Beta 3 may have sucked, but Release Candidate 1 was released recently, I think. It is even better than IE 8 Beta 1. Why oh why does the good just keep gettin' better.
Even though I do believe FireFox 3 RC1 is faster and has not as many issues as IE 8 Beta 1. I do think that both browsers are top notch.
Example of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 site that doesn't work.
http://w3schools.com/js/default.asp
Example of FireFox 3 not supporting a tad bit of either CSS or Javascript, I've yet to take the time to look into the code
http://chat.zelaron.com/forum/mychat.php?
(to the right of the message you post is the color, it is black in FF3, while IE 8 shows it as the proper color)
Those are some of the problems I've seen with IE8. Also, IE8 is a bit slow. It just lags a lot, and tends to leave one box when writing Decimal and Hex HTML unicode format for no reason, even though the second time I write the same character it appears with no problems.
FireFox 2 = Takes a lot Memory (Problem for Some Laptops)
FireFox 3 RC1 = Handles Memory and overall performance far better than IE8 and FF2. Loading Speeds in Pages have improved.
Internet Explorer 7 = Takes not nearly as much memory as FF2, but supports far less CSS than more standard browsers.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 = Rocks, but has some serious lag issues.
Get FF3 RC1 Coriander, it will rock your world more than IE 8!