Are you running Internet Explorer 8?

What?   That's right....IE 8. IE8 Beta 1 to be specific.

I am running the Vista x64 edition and while I have only been running it for the better part of 3 days, I am pleased. There are some new features I have not had a chance to check out yet. The new "webslices" feature will just take some time for web content creators to pull things together for. The concept for webslices is that you can subscribe to a "slice" or a piece of a web page instead of to the entire page. Maybe you want to see when a particular graphic on a page updates? This will let you do that without having to load the whole page. There are better examples in this short video on WebSlices.

Activities are what have me really stoked though. I do a lot of lookups from web-based information. This is a manual and frustrating process for me. Now I can just highlight something like an address, click the activities button and get it mapped through a mapping service without having to cut and paste anything. Fabulous. Short video of activities.

One down side I have run across is that IE 8 does not render my Windows Live Home page correctly. This is a big deal to me as it is where I have homed all of my RSS feeds. On the upside, IE8 has a nice button in the tool bar that switches it to IE7 Mode. I use that on the Windows Live Home page and life is good.

There is a tool/Add-in that allows you to notify us of pages that do not render properly in IE8. You can grab that tool here.

What do you think about IE8?

Cheers!