Internet Explorer 8 BETA Version

Hot off the heels of Internet Explorer 7 comes the next “end all-be all” internet browser from Microsoft.

Are YOU ready to take the plunge? If so, keep a few things in mind…

1: IE8 is in BETA release– CRASHES ARE GUARANTEED!
2: IE7 and IE8 cannot co-exist. If you install this beta 1 version, IE* becomes your primary browser.
3: There seems to be a compatibility issue between IE8 and the widely used Google and Yahoo toolbars. You will have to forgo these add-ons for the immediate future.
4: Read through the articles I’ve provided links for at the bottom of this page and make sure you know the implications if you intend to go down this path. I, for one, intend to pass on this initial beta release. We still aren’t fully satisfied with IE7 so why mess with this version.

Once we get a later BETA version installed and working on a test machine, I’ll revisit this with our personal experience.

So- according to Microsoft, here are some of the New and exciting features:

Activities
Activities are contextual services to quickly accessa 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.

An example of a “send” Activity is a user reads an interesting article and wants to blog about a portion of the article. The user can select a portion of the article and uses the blog activity. This navigates to the user’s blog site with the selection already available in the edit feild.

Activities are services that the user can install and manage. Users can install them from the Internet Explorer 8 Service Guide or through any website that advertises Activities.

Webslices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to thier 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.

Internet Explorer 8 users can discover WebSlices within a webpage and add them to the Favorites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. Internet Explorer 8 subscribes to the webpage, detects changes in the WebSlice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favorites bar and click-through to the website to get more information.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the links bar provided users with one-click access to thier 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.

A user can easily ass a link to the Favorites bar by using the Add to Favorites button and selecting the Add to Favorites Bar option.

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 inlikely 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.

see Automatic Crash Recovery white paper for more information

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.”