Digital Home Thoughts: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available For Download

"We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we'll take a more holistic approach. That's how we built the product and how we'd like to talk about it. From our customer research, we saw that the bulk of user activity outside of web pages involved tabs and "navigation" - the act of getting to the site the user wants to get to. We also knew that adding features has an impact only if they're "in the flow" of how people actually use the product. Another menu item might matter in a checklist on a blog somewhere, but won't matter to real people browsing. That's why IE8's New Tab experience is so remarkable: it's obvious - after you see it..."

IE8 beta 2 looks like it has some nice features, but without a spell check or a download manager, it's not going to win me over from Firefox. Web slices look pretty cool though! Want to take it for a spin? Download it now. Looking for a deep dive on the new features? Brandon LeBlanc has that for you.