14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 was the stage where Chairman Bill Gates announced that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 would be made available for the general public in August. As Beta 1 was a build focused almost exclusively on web content developers and designers, the Redmond giant indicated from early March that Beta 2 would be a consumer-oriented release. In this context, Tony Chor, IE Group Program Manager promised that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 would deliver "great" and "new" features. On stage at Tech Ed 2008, Gates did manage to talk about what IE8 Beta 2 would bring to the table in less than a couple of months.
And, so far, IE 8 Beta 2 looks disappointing. Simply because, as in the case of Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server, the Redmond company is also not revealing details about the next development milestone for Internet Explorer 8. It is clear that Beta 1 does not contain the complete feature set of IE7's successor, but Microsoft is not sharing anything about what's actually coming in IE8 Beta 2.
"In addition to the features for developers we showed in IE8 Beta 1, we've been working on great new features for consumers and IT professionals (as well as doing even more cool stuff for developers). I'm happy to announce that we're on track to deliver IE8 Beta 2 this August when you'll get a chance to see what we've been up to in these areas," Chor stated.
During his presentation at Tech Ed 2008, Bill Gates was equally reluctant to actually talk Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Even though the next milestone release is less than two months away, Gates addressed the issue of IE's evolution in general terms.
"Now when you're connecting up through the Web, of course, the browser is the runtime you're connected to. And we've had a renewed effort to really invest in Internet explorer. It's an important product for us. We put out Internet Explorer 7.0 not long ago. We're hard at work on a new version of that, so-called IE8, a very creative name that we've come up with. And you're going to see the beta for this coming out in August of this year," he stated.
One thing obviously clear is that IE8 Beta 2 will be offered in no less than 20 languages. According to Microsoft, users around the world will be able to enjoy IE8 Beta 2 in Arabic; Chinese (Hong Kong); Chinese (Simplified); Chinese (Traditional); Czech; Danish; Dutch; English; Finnish; French; German; Greek; Hebrew; Hungarian; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Norwegian; Portuguese (Brazil); Portuguese (Portugal); Polish; Russian; Spanish; Turkish and Swedish.
But as far as the actual new and great features of IE8 Beta 2 are concerned, they might as well not exist. Gates did talk some details about Beta 2, but only mentioned the features that are already available in Beta 1.
"It's got activities where you can take a set of things you do on the Web and group them together. And so that will be very important. And then it's got what are called slices, which are essentially small Web pages where you can highlight the portion of your page that should appear when somebody has not got it in a full-size window. It lets you get at the snippet type things, and provide a persistent presence in a very simple way, and we've made that extremely straightforward," Gates said.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download via this link.