Last Wednesday, at its MIX'08 Web developer conference in Las Vegas Microsoft unveiled a public beta of Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming standards-based Web browser.

While publicly available, the beta is aimed at web developers. But for those of you who can't resist, I suggest you start by reading the Release Notes and have a look at the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit.

Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer Team General Manager, presented a list of developer-oriented improvements that were made to IE8 to date. But a more important decision was made earlier: to make the default rendering mode standards-based.

Microsoft has published a features page that lists the new features of IE8 such as:

• Activities
• WebSlices
• Favorites Bar
• Automatic Crash Recovery
• Improved Phishing Filter

Activities allow you (via a right-click contextual menu) to &look up& information within a webpage or &send& web content to a web application. For example, you might be interested in a restaurant and want to find its location. WebSlices allows users to crop a specific area section of a site and bookmark it.

If you decide to try the IE8 beta, you have to know that (like IE7) it will replace IE7. One thing that does make this beta easier though is the addition of a button labeled Emulate IE7. If you have trouble accessing a web site (financial websites are notorious for this), just press the button, and the browser will behave (and be seen as) IE7.

The IE 8 beta will run on both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows Vista SP1 as well as Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 and 2008. You can download a copy of the beta from the Microsoft Web site.

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Last Updated: March 7, 2008

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