Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8.0 today at its Mix conference for Web developers. The company detailed the browser's new features and offered the first beta of the browser to the public.

Internet Explorer 8.0 is a shift from previous versions in that it focuses heavily on complying with Web standards. "The Web gets better when developers can spend less time working through interoperability issues and more time developing," Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a keynote address. "Today, differences between browsers simply waste too much developer time."

A standards-compliant browser will allow developers to create Web apps and sites with less worry about how the sites act from browser to browser. But it could also break some Web sites that had been specifically designed to work with past versions of Internet Explorer. However, IE8 will include the capability to render pages as IE7 would have done, thereby providing a work around for pages IE8 may have broken.

Microsoft is adding new standards support such as support for CCS 2.1 and HTML 5. Support for HTML 5 will allow developers to create Web sites that are aware of whether a user is connected to the Internet or not and save content until the user reconnects. It also brings the ability for developers to create Ajax apps that react to the back button instead of going back to the previous page. "The point is that for the end user, the experience is smooth and works the way they expect," Hachamovitch said.

IE8 includes a number of new features not found in IE7 and other previous versions, including Activities, WebSlices, and automatic crash recovery. It also has an improved phishing filter and a made-over favorites bar.

Activities is a way to access other Web services from within a Web page. Whereas users often have to copy and paste information from one Web page to another, Activities will let them right-click on Web site content to map, define, send, share, or blog information from within the Web page itself. "Today, I end up copying and selecting a tab and pasting and that's just a pain," Hachamovitch said. With Activities, users could search for an item on eBay or share it on Facebook. Customized activity scripts can be written in XML.

WebSlices is a way for users and developers to essentially create custom content from dynamic content on a Web site. For example, a site might have weather information along with a bunch of other content, but users might want to have access to only the weather information whenever they want it without having to see the other content. WebSlices lets users subscribe to just that slice of the Web site, much like a customized RSS feed, by wrapping a few lines of code around the code for that portion of the Web site. The WebSlice, which might also be Facebook status updates or tracking an eBay item, will be available as a drop down window in the favorites bar.

IE8 also includes a made-over favorites bar that acts as a place to keep links to users' top favorites within view at all times, much like a similar capability in Firefox. Microsoft is also adding automatic crash recovery, a feature that Firefox has, but extends it by recovering even single browser tabs that have experienced problems. The phishing filter in IE8 is also improved.