Internet Explorer 8 (beta) is here for web developers and designers. It is a developer preview for web designers and developers to help prepare their websites for the launch of Internet Explorer 8. (Ref: Internet Explorer Blog)

My understanding of its new features, after watching the demo videos:

Developer Tools: IE 8 comes with a built-in Developers tool which is a bit like Firefox firebug extension.
Activities: This provides a quick and easy access to other websites in a click. You may have websites such as Google map, Facebook, MSN Search, etc in your activities menu. Let's say you are visiting a website which has an address printed and you'd like to find out where exactly it is using Google map. Instead of opening a new browser window, going to google map website and copy and pasting the address, you can just highlight the address from the original website, click on Activities icon, and choose Google map from the Activities menu. Not exactly a new technology, but it's useful.
Webslices: The concept of a webslice is very similar to that of a feed. You subscribe to a webslice which can be a web page (example: an ebay auction page for a particular item) or an extract of a page, place it on your Favourites toolbar, and IE will tell you when there is any update to the webslice.
AJAX Navigation: Everyone knows one drawback of using Ajax for web applications - Ajax requests are stateless to the server and does not use normal page refresh and therefore it is often impossible to go back to a previous state of an ajax request. Well, it looks like this is going to change with AJAX navigation feature in IE 8. Basically, AJAX navigation monitors and tracks Ajax navigation states, allowing you to go back and forward between states in a similar manner as how you would go back and forward between pages in history. To utilise this feature, you will need to add some extra javascript code to your existing ajax applications.

[tags]browsers, firefox, internet explorer, ie8, ie, web browser[/tags]