Microsoft has made available the Beta 1 release of Windows Internet Explorer 8.

Some of the end-user features that you can expect to see in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 include the following:

• 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.
• 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.
• Improved Phishing Filter: Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user's personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the "Safety Filter."

Download: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008)

View: More Information on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
News source: Microsoft

Nice find Singh400 and thanks for sharing.

Info appreciated.
Now; let the fun begin and hope it all works.

Just installed for Vista 64 and the install went smoothly. It looks like there's an option to emulate IE7, which you have to restart IE8 to enable. The interface is mildly different with some changes on to how the toolbar looks and it also looks like there's some more colorful icons in the standard toolbar buttons (Home, RSS, Print, Tools, etc). So far so good, but one problem I found already is the it doesn't seem to want to highlight text selected with the mouse in the text box that I'm currently typing in (Fast Reply). We'll see how well everything else works.

I wonder if I'm going to have to reinstall Flash and all that jazz...

Well I have been playing around with it for a little while now. Some random thoughts:

• Minor glitches with a few pages that I have developed (which passed the W3C validator)
• Major glitches with Google Maps
• Major glitches on Microsoft's own website! Page goes black when I click a menu choice, and menu items are not shown.
• It feels very much like a beta. And seems just a little sluggish.
• Still no spell check. Spell check would certainly be nice.
• No (much-needed) improvements to file downloading, other than the links being checked by the safety filter.
• I see some potential with the "Activities" feature. I just wish the "Define with Encarta" activity would show the definition on a mouse hover like Live Maps does.
• I'm not sure how useful the WebSlice feature would end up being to me. I don't like the favorites bar turned on, so I probably won't use WebSlices.
• And lastly, my favorite feature... Making the domain name bold. So simple, yet brilliant. Why didn't they think of this sooner, and when can we expect this to be implemented in FireFox?

All in all, I'm not really impressed, and I think I'll stick with FireFox for now.


EDIT:
How interesting... It seems that a single IE8 window uses multiple processes. That way if one page crashes it doesn't bring down the whole browser. Nice.

Agreed. I'm trying out the IE7 emulation mode now and it seems to be working OK. A bit on the slow side yet, but it's definitely an improvement as far as not having to deal with bugs goes. If I run into any more issues, I think I'm just going to uninstall it...In all reality, I use IE too often to really be using a beta build of it anyway.

I don't get what they mean with following standards and improved AJAX support. It doesn't render anything well enough to be usuable. Even IE6 is better. Run the ACID tests with it, lol...

just so you guys know, they are calling this a beta but it's a VERY early beta meant for "developers developers developers developers":

Yeah, IMO that's brilliant. In today's world of multiple cores and multiple gigs of RAM, I'll trade more resources for that ability.

I tried it out today. I never was a fan of IE7s interface, so this was hard to get used to.

After I got to my first webpage, and it couldn't type into a search field, I decided my testing was over with. Its my work machine, not a test machine, so I went back.

Of course my roll back did some damage. I know its minor, but all my html files have their icons all sorts of messed up. Not sure what other damage is done yet.

Heads up:

Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta Add-On: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;DisplayLang=en

"The Microsoft Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer Add-on allows the user to submit a report to Microsoft for webpages they believe are having rendering problems, scripting errors, or various other types of problems."

Ah, thanks for the heads up Singh.

Reset the associations or install IE7 again from Microsofts website or install FireFox. Should fix it.

eh, I am sticking with Firefox

Does this version remember user names at websites you wish it to remember them at. Such as here at Iexbeta?

If not, will NEVER update past IE6 then. Nothing you folks have said above would warrant me updating, especially with the mention of eye candy stuff and a favorite bar. That has to be one of the dumbest inventions ever!! Yuck!!

Typical Beta. Im a IE7 user. and i still would like to see the following:

1.Built in download manager (supports resumes, and muilti source downloading)

2. Built in PDF viewer.

3. Interagtred with outlook 07 like the old days.

Amen. I uninstalled IE8 though. It was so slow in areas that it made me remember why I hate Internet Explorer to begin with. Now if only if it could understand transparent images are well, transparent....