Today at MIX08 Microsoft announced that it is releasing Windows Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 for testing.

With today’s release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft said this version of Internet Explorer is targeted at developers, however, anyone whom wants to give it a try may do so at the own peril. Microsoft has made a lot of improvements in Internet Explorer 8 since its release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has added a lot of new features. The features improve the usability and compatibility with websites.
The following features have been added to Internet Explorer 8:

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

Feature breakdown:

Activities
Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

Activities typically involve two types of scenarios: "look up" information within a webpage or "send" web content to a web application. For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see the location of it. This is the form of a "look up" Activity where the user selects the address and views an in-place view of the map using his favorite map service.

WebSlices
WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Favorites Bar
In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Perhaps one of the best new features is Automatic Crash Recovery which recovers your tabs if your browser crashes. As expected Microsoft has released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8, the future of compatible web-browsing begins today.

Internet Explorer 8 can be installed on Microsoft Windows Vista® Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows Vista, Windows XP® Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server® 2008 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2). Downloads are available from the following locations:

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Window XP SP2
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64 Edition and Windows XP SP2 Pro x64 Edition

Also, I encourage you to take a look at our Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 screen shot gallery which will be posted soon.

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