It was almost two weeks and counting ago that Microsoft sent out the beta invites for Internet Explorer 8. The first batch were primarily web developers. MIX08 was right around the corner and what more than the perfect opportunity to wow Microsoft fans with a launch of IE8 Beta 1. From start to finish, the install took a little under 15 minutes on Windows Server 2008, and around 10 minutes on my Vista SP1 x64 setup. After having used it for a couple hours now some of the main features that I think people will want to look out for are: Activities, Webslices, the Automatic Crash Recovery and a new and improved Phishing Filter.

• Activities allow for a user to highlight and right click and use the content to blog,look up, send or share on places like facebook. It essentially eliminates the need for you to navigate to the other site and go through the hassle of pasting back and forth what you want.
• Webslices are very similar to what we currently know as RSS feeds but better! With Webslices you subscribe to get updates within a webpage and add them directory to the favorites bar. Webslices detect changes at the site and notifies the user of the update.
• Automatic Crash Recovery is equalivant to Firefox’s recovery mechanism where if the browser crashes then the tabs you had open before that crash will be recovered. Pretty straight forward but a welcome feature.
• Last, the Phishing Filter now ‘Safety filter’ has been updated and improved and a slight overlooked change to this is most URL’s now show a darker tint of black to show that the site is legit.

Word has it that more people will be getting into the IE8 beta as the pool opens up within the coming months. Stay tuned! The summer is shaping up to be very exciting.