Today Microsoft launched the public beta of Internet Explorer 8 at MIX'08. As i posted in a blogposting yesterday the big change in Internet Explorer 8 is the render engine which is running in "super standard mode" instead of quirks mode that IE7 uses. You can download the public beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

One thing microsoft learned about the release of IE7 was that after the first Beta release of IE7 there were so many reactions, complaints and idea's send by people that it was almost undoable to do something with all the input. With this release of IE8 Microsoft opened up there bug database to the public so everyone can see the known bugs and people can even help prioritize these bugs.

One of the new feature in IE8 apart from the render engine is the use of "webslices" (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/webslices.mspx) these webslices look like a sort of rss technology where you can subscribe yourself to a part of a website instead of an rss feed and the webslice technology will let you know when the data changed.

Microsoft also released the beta of Silverlight 2.0. Scott Guthrie made a nice post about that on his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

There are also some nice video's on the website of MIX 08. These video's and part of the website are made with silverlight 1.0 so check it out:

mix website: http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx

mix videos: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Geert van der Cruijsen