Microsoft unveiled yesterday (March 05, 2008) its next generation of browser franchise, Internet Explorer 8, i.e. IE8 beta version at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. Just like many others I have been playing with it. But as Microsoft noted, IE8 beta is not for general uses at this point, strictly for beta testers and developers, freezing and crashes should be expected. I have encountered couple of freezes and crashes during my tests.

So far I have seen that IE8 isn’t an upgrade that will bring bunch of shiny, earth shattering features to make you amaze, rather you can say this is a small IE7 fix. Microsoft is promising IE8 will be fully compliant with W3C standards, which they have been overlooking ever since. Even with my not so smart brain I always wonder, why world’s most popular browser is deciding to get along with standards last in a row, where it should have been super compliant all along.

Among new features Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is one of them that Microsoft was bragging a lot, is sounds very promising. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions. Would have been nicer if IE8 beta don’t crash as often as monsoon rain, though I am confident the public release version would be more crash proof.

The Links bar (in IE7) has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favourites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favourite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Now you may ask what is webslices? WebSlices is a new feature for web sites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a web page. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes. In IE8 Users can discover WebSlices within a web page and add them to the Favourites bar, a dedicated row below the Address bar for easy access to links. IE8 subscribes to the web page, detects changes in the WebSlice, and notifies the user of updates. Users can preview these updates directly from the Favourites bar and click-through to the webs ite to get more information.

Another new feature called Activities, which are contextual services for accessing a service from any Web page. Activities are designed to make copying and pasting between Web pages easier to do. Other notable new feature is an improved phishing filter that includes a new “Safety Filter.”

After all these apart from “Promise of web standard compliance”, nothing really exciting on IE8 that will knocks me of my feet, unlike Microsoft’s Office 2007 which was total off the ground improvement from its predecessors. Nop I am not comparing Office with the browser—rather I am talking about innovation, the charisma, the flair of something utter different.

So maybe someday IE will rock my world! But not just yet!