One aspect of the evolution from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8 is the introduction of accelerators. Designed to streamline mundane and repetitive actions performed via the browser, accelerators are an integral part of IE8, kicking functionality up a notch. The successor of IE7 does ship with a range of accelerators by default, but fact is that the browser can act as a platform, permitting additional customizations. One such example is the Digg Accelerator, which can be added to IE8.

“Digg is an online destination that enables people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. This new Digg Accelerator enables you to quickly Digg, Submit, and find related content from anywhere on the Web. A great tool! Also, coming soon, is a Silverlight version of the accelerator providing a really rich experience for Digg stories,” revealed John C. Stame, platform strategy advisor at Microsoft.

The Digg Accelerator does nothing more than to intimately connect Internet Explorer 8 with the Digg social network. Adding it to the browser is an extremely simple task. All that users need to do is to navigate to the page hosting the Digg Accelerator and click the Add to Internet Explorer button. A new item will be now featured under the add-on content for IE8. Through the Manage Add-ons dialog window, users will be able to set the Dell Accelerator as default, disable/enable it or remove it completely.

Microsoft wrapped up IE8 earlier this year, and made the browser available for download starting with March 18, 2009. Since that time, the IE team revealed plans to move forward, and started collecting feedback for the next version of IE, referred to as Internet Explorer 9. Since it is only harvesting user input, the company did not make any details related to IE.Next plans public.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).