IE8 Beta is Out

Internet Explorer 8 (beta) is now available for download, and as I predicted in my web trends "the web community will love it - nobody else will notice any difference."

IE 8 does not seem to have changed anything. All the sites I have tested - including this one - works fine. The interface has been changed very little.

The only real difference is this little icon in the toolbar, which changes IE8's browsing behavior to the one used in IE7 (since all the ones works fine in IE8, the button doesn't make any difference).

But, if you do spend some extra time looking at it, you will find that there are indeed a number of changes and new features.

Activities

One is "Activities" that allow you to do things with the text on the screen (see video) - like sending it to Yahoo Mail, translating it etc. It is a nice idea, but I do not think people will actually use it.

&#187 See Demonstration

Web Slices

Another new feature is Web Slices, which allow you to subscribe to parts of a website. This is actually pretty cool.

&#187 See Demonstration

Developer Tools

The really cool stuff is of course the things for us web developers. Most noticeably is the built in "Developer Tools", which allow you to inspect the page you looking at, and debug it *LIVE*. You can even add breakpoints and see just what is going on.

This is going save us so much time when we are making web applications. I am super excited about this.

&#187 See Demonstration

The last great thing is that IE 8 support AJAX interaction. Meaning, that you can now force the navigation buttons (back button etc) in the browser to follow AJAX interaction - instead of just showing the last full page.

&#187 See Demonstration

Ohh... and, of course, IE8 passes the Acid2 CSS test (see also note about Acid2 copies)

(Videos from Microsoft)