Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta Free Download

8 March, 2008 (10:19) | Reviews, Software | By: AhTim

Internet Explorer 8 beta is available for free download. Although I am not an internet explorer user, I still excited and curious what’s new on Internet Explorer 8 beta lauched.

I have downloaded IE8 (14.4MB) and installed on my computer. After restart, IE8 is ready to use.

What’s New in IE8?

There are 2 main new features in Internet Explorer 8 named Activities and Webslices. With these new features, your browsing experience will be more customizable and direct to your desire content. Activities is a search service that allow you to access external service or information right on the webpage you surf. While webslice allow you to subscribe to portion of the content to your IE8 favorite bar. It’s useful to monitor updates for weather, items price and stock, etc.

Still not sure what is that? See the screenshot below. The first screenshot is Activities feature. For example when you are browsing some website with address, you want to know the address location. Just highlight the address, an green color arrow icon will pop up. Click on the green arrow icon and select “Map with Live Maps”. A map to the location will pop up for your reference. This save your time to search out of the webpage. Many more activities can be done by using the shortcut.

For webslice feature, click on the white round purple box to add the webslice into Favorite. Once it add in, you just need to click on the webslice from favorite to monitor the content. For example, I have added an iPod Touch FM transmitter webslice to ease my monitoring task.

My two cents

A website must build with its codes to provide these services. Ebay is one of the partner that created these features. We do not know how Microsoft benefit from this stratergy, but it looks interesting. Hopefully Firefox 3 work on these features or at least similar to them.

Although the new features in Internet Explorer 8 is interesting, I will still stick to Firefox for its high performance. Do you think these features useful for you?