Windows Internet Explorer 8

At the recent MIX08 conference in Las Vegas the Internet Explorer team announced a public beta of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for web developers. This beta release does not change the UI much but introduces the new so called standards based rendering engine among other new features. Highlights includes new developer tools, Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are new ways for program developers to show their services on another site, removing the need for copy and paste. By selecting a piece of text and right clicking, a list of activities is displayed. See the video below for more information on activities.

Video: Internet Explorer 8 Activities

Another new feature in Windows Internet Explorer 8 is the webslices feature. This allows you to subscribe to updates on a web page. One useful demonstration of this is a WebSlice for an eBay auction. You can easily see the changes to an auction by hovering over the item that was placed on your favorites bar when you subscribed to it. The feature works with many popular sites such as Facebook to easily see updates without actually going to the web page. Just like Activities, you subscribe to Activities in a similar fashion but instead of going to a page that list Activities you can add, you just hover over the content and the WebSlice icon will appear if the site supports it. See the video below for a demonstration of web slices.

Video: Internet Explorer 8 WebSlices

This beta release of Internet Explorer was released only for web designers. A lot of websites, including WinGeek.com do not render properly in IE8 because of changes to the render engine. Thankfully Microsoft created an “Emulate IE7″ mode so users can still view web pages that don’t render properly in IE8 (Installing IE8 removes IE7). If you would like to test IE8 download below:

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Download

Screenshots Of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1: