Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, unveiled IE8 Beta 1 during his keynote address at MIX08. This was the first time that Internet Explorer 8 was presented to the public. Hachamovitch presented a total of eight features of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The first step focused on added CSS 2.1 support. According to Hachamovitch, CSS 2.1 support is a great place to start when it comes down to evolving Web standards support for Internet Explorer 8. Next came CSS certification and support for HTML 5. Users will be able to enjoy connection events, which means they will be safeguarded from network connectivity issues and also save content locally, all thanks to HTML 5. Hachamovitch also presented a new debugger for Internet Explorer 8 aimed at developers. Another important aspect is performance. IE8 was brought on par with Firefox and Safari in this respect.

Activities were also highlighted. "Activities are contextual services to quickly access a 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," Microsoft revealed.

Hachamovitch moved on to WebSlices. "WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their 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," Microsoft explained.

The Redmond company has also evolved the browser's links bar. IE8's overhauled links bar will permit users to access a variety of content from links to WebSlices to Office documents and to feeds with a single click. And building on the security features implemented into Internet Explorer 7, IE8 will deliver an improved phishing filter. And last but definitely not least, IE8 will feature Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR), and it was about high time! Hachamovitch ended with the promise that IE8 Beta 1 will be available for the public to download as soon as the keynote will be over, which means that, in just a few hours, you'll be able to run the browser. You will be able to get it here.