Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 8 during the MIX08 keynote today in Las Vegas and then made a developer beta publically available for download. The key features of IE8 are full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE8 product, improved scripting performance, start of support for HTML 5, and “Actives” and “Webslices.” Microsoft describes Activies as contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage and WebSlices as portions of web pages that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes. Microsoft has a weather webslice example and blogging, search, mapping and other Activities defined.
Microsoft notes that this release is targeted at developers and suggests users should wait until the next beta for a better experience. As with other versions of IE you cannot run the beta side-by-side with IE7 but a proconfigured Virtual PC image containing the beta is available.