Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 Available For Developers

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled the first beta version of its much-awaited of Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) for developers at the ongoing MIX08, Microsoft's Web designer and developer conference in Las Vegas.

The software giant also announced its availability of the first beta of the browser for download by developers. The testing version of IE 8 is available for a wide range of Windows operating systems including Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 SP2. However, it will not install on "prerelease versions of Windows Vista SP1" or "checked versions of Windows", Microsoft said.

Microsoft described the latest Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on its Website as a developer preview for web designers and developers to help prepare their websites for the launch of new version. A developer toolbar and improved interoperability and compatibility are some of the new features that are designed for developers.

"A lot of the end user or consumer features are not featured on this build because it really is targeted at the developers and the designers," Matthew Lepsen from the Microsoft IE development team, said on a video produced by Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft's Channel 9 site.

Besides providing the better predictability when designing sites and full support for cascading style sheet (CSS) 2.1 at release to manufacturing, the testing version of IE8 includes integrated developer tools to quickly debug HTML, CSS and scripts in a visual environment, Microsoft said.

In addition to CSS 2.1 support, CSS Certification, performance, start of HTML 5 support and new developer tools, the new version also includes two new features, Activities and WebSlices.

Activities are contextual services that are intended to provide quick access to external services from any Web site, Microsoft said. The feature will enable users look up information related to data on the current page and send content from the current page to another application. For example, users on a restaurant Web site can click within the page to get maps, look up news on the restaurant, blog about it, or share on Facebook.

"We're always going to love control-v, control-c, but right now we're trying to shorten up the steps," Lepsen said. "The whole idea of tab proliferation? You don't always have to have that. Access to what you want to do most often is going to be a lot easier."

WebSlices is an RSS-like feature that enables Web sites to expose portions of their page that users can subscribe to. In addition, IE8 will identify WebSlices within a page, and add them to the favorites bar, enabling users to receive update notifications when the content changes.

“WebSlices are simply portions of arbitrary websites to which a user can subscribe to. This enables a user to have updates of sites he regularly visits right at his fingertips without navigating to the respective sites,” said Microsoft software architect Alexander Strauss.

IE8 would likely face tuff competition from Mozilla later this year, whose Firefox 3.0 web browser is currently in the Beta 3 phase. The 1st version of Firefox 3 was released in November, and in December Mozilla rolled out the more stable version– the Beta 2. The 3rd version of Firefox 3, which is widely available in more than 30 languages, has received favorable reviews around the web.

Here it is: Click to test IE8 beta 1